While I agree with the authors sentiment and do try not to include 'click here' links in any of the content I'm asked to post. I disagree with his assertion that it's confusing and slows people down.
Having been on the Internet almost daily since the late 90's. I can say with some degree of certainty that the ambitiousness of 'click here' links on the Internet has more or less trained people to look for them.
In the authors example
Jcrew email receipt
For additional order details, please click here to go to your account.
For additional order details, go to your account.
Not only do I immediately understand 'click here' to go to my account, but 'click here' conveys that the link will deep link me directly to the referenced section or pertinent information that the sentence is discussing.
Alternately a 'your account' link, does not convey this message. It tells me I am going to a general account management interface, and will then need to browse around to find the information or section referenced by the sentence.
I believe 'click here' links have their place and convey the very specific message that they should deep link someone directly to the content referenced in the link and not just to a site that contains the referenced content somewhere on the page.
I'm generally with the author on this, but their examples are inconsistent. I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase. We want the user to do something (click here), and verbs are "do words."
So, instead of
For additional order details, go to [your account].
use
For additional order details, [go to your account].
(The author does this inconsistently.)
And in this case:
To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].
You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.
they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."
Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like
This is exactly the sort of article that reminds me of how full of themselves SO MANY people in web design are. It's why I never take anything any "strong" so-called UI/UX expert ideas or notions or whatever particularly seriously, and instead actually listen to the client (not what they say they want, but what goals they actually have)
In this case, the client is my 70ish dad and the people he interacts with for his project. Last thing I'm going to do is be like "no, it's not 1995, people don't need 'click here' this anymore."
People who write articles like this keep people like me in business.
Around 1994, I'm pretty sure I saw ordinary simple "how to make a Web page" tutorials that told you specifically not do "here" or "click here" links.
You were to instead make the link around relevant text.
(Also, early people often got hypertext just fine. The problem was print designers, who kept wanting to make the Web be glossy brochures. At first, they'd try things like making the whole page a GIF/JPEG, and would get laughed at, but they soon took over what a Web browser is, for the entire field. Over the decades, they'd then slowly rediscover ideas that were there from the beginning, and give them names like "responsive design" and "accessibility", and write books about them. On Monday, I had to battle with a Web site framework, to force something exotic called "server-side rendering", and also to make an `<a href=URL>` element be a hypertext link that the Web browser loads as a Web page when the user chooses to follow the link.)
Amen. Graphic designers with a background in anything print have been a huge hindrance to the web. After a long time in the wilderness of single-page apps and framework, I see at least some small cracks of light where people are recognizing how simple/useful pages (e.g. McMaster-Carr) can be the most "beautiful".
It wasn’t just Nielsen saying this. Pretty much anybody who knew anything about usability or accessibility was telling people not to use “click here” for links since the 90s, and once Google arrived with PageRank, SEO people started saying the same thing. This has been best practice for at least a quarter century for multiple reasons.
It's a bit jarring (but not in a bad way) to read "It's not 1995." on a page that uses no JavaScript, no images, and where the only styling is "body { width:650px; }".
"Click here" screams "this is a link". It is not as obvious a call to click upon as a big shiny button, aching to be pressed, but it is more obvious than a few words that are in a harder-to-read color and underlined.
"You can go to _your_account_" is a much smoother sentence than "To change your account, click _here_". But is that always what you want? Do you want all your links to be smoothly integrated into the body text? Sometimes you do! Sometimes you don't.
Maybe not so related, but the Spotify desktop client uses a link-styled piece of text after having downloaded an update — "click here to to update" — when you navigate to the updates menu, where I would expect a button instead of a regular link
Accessibility and universal design may be another important factor. I’ve recall that usage of “click here” makes it harder for screen reader users to tell what link they are trying to click on. I haven’t caught up with the tech in awhile, but such a small change/effort on my part has been ingrained into my link making!
Agreed, and I think a lot of his reasoning falls apart if you look at his specific examples:
> What will I see if I click a link labeled "click here"? I have no idea. Instead, choose link text that describes the destination.
Pretty much all of the examples are of the form of "To do action XYZ, click here". Why aren't you considering the "do action XYZ" part of the sentence?
> It confuses search engines
No, it doesn't. As he said previously, "this is not 1995" - search engines also take into account the context around links and images.
Most importantly, though, these are all just this guy's feelings. While I think A/B tests definitely have limitations, this type of small change is the kind of thing that can absolutely be probed scientifically (i.e. A/B tests, formal user studies, etc.) If you're in a company where people are strongly arguing one side or the other of this debate, I'd just use the famous quote by Jim Barksdale: "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."
I agree. Click here also provides better context if the CSS doesn't clearly indicate a hyperlink or if the user is unfamiliar with html link styling, and in cases where the web browser veers into non-standard territory.
If you use real link, your training people to trust what the text says is actually where you're going to go..
By making people do extra work to see where click here goes you might actually be training to protect themselves... Of course that doesn't work when Outlook goes and wraps the whole thing in a safety URL you can't see past... Or with shorteners.. but in all of those cases, I know to be more cautious.
In Win98SE days, I setup a PC for my parents to use. It was their first computer, and I personalized it the way I setup mine: enable view extensions and path bar in Explorer, remove the Go button in IE, and so on.
Then I got a call from my Mom: "I typed in the web address, now what do I do?"
To me, it was obvious: hit Enter. But MS had done their A/B testing, and that Go button was for the beginning user.
For the OP to assume that everyone is as adept as they are is folly. As another user lamented, sometimes you have to rub the user's nose in it for them to know they can click something.
I believed this until I kept getting tickets about people not knowing where to click. So, we made links look like buttons, and stopped getting tickets. Then our designer didn't like the buttons, so the click here links were the only option.
People struggle with discovery, even though they shouldn't.
I ask because you say people struggle with discovery, but modern UI trends are all about simplifying and flattening, which comes at the cost of discovery.
I remember in the 90s, links were typically blue and underlined, maybe even bold? Links stuck out like a sore thumb. These days, that's considered ugly, and you might be lucky if links are even underlined.
Just yesterday I had an instance of a user being confused by a link that would probably have made TFA's author happy. This isn't the first user to be confused by these supposedly-clearer links. I'm going to be adding a 'Click Here' text very shortly.
Ew. The examples in the 'Real Examples' look terrible, especially the last two. You usually shouldn't put links in the middle of a text. If you have a link and a description, rather use
description : >Click here<
The last example does it right, the example above it is almost right. And this holds even more on real websites, where the links are not underlined and blue.
Some exceptions are hypertext heavy documents, like wikipedia, or a dictionary. But if you want to point somewhere, refer something, or provide an option to an action, you shouldn't put that in the middle of a sentence or in the middle of a line. Put it at the end.
I agree in principle with the article. But I have spent time reading help desk tickets so I know that average users often don't know where to click unless you push their nose in it. I can't count how many times users have said "I was afraid to click the link" or "I don't know where that button will go" because the UI presented links and buttons with meaningful titles instead of imperative commands. I just have to watch my parents try to navigate a web site to feel deep humility about how I think people use the web. They got stuck in 1995 I guess.
This kind of advice should come with A/B testing on actual users. I think we would all facepalm at the results.
Agreed. We have many "old" people that use our website and I can tell you for a fact that the "click here" is less confusing than some random blue link (which at this point has lost it's meaning because of seo keyword stuffing).
Not to mention "click here" is a call to action and a random blue link is not. Call to actions are important.
Well, it doesn’t help matters when CIOs berate us at town halls “the entire company blew up literally because someone clicked ONE LINK they shouldn’t have!!!!” and I’ve sat through many of those “blame the user” sessions.
Two factor has resulted in similar berating. “How dare someone click APPROVE at 2am?!” Well, they were trying to silence the phone when they were attempting to sleep. Why are you allowing pushes outside of business hours without an additional layer of security? Maybe that giant APPROVE button isn’t the best default option at 2am?
Sometimes you can't win. I worked on a site that had what I call a punitive UI -- buttons and links that would throw up a modal alert telling users they shouldn't have clicked on that. When I started changing the UI so users didn't see controls/links they shouldn't click on, users complained that "the web page changed," as if they had memorized exact pixel locations and I caused their confusion. Pigeons pecking at the green dot.
Numerous studies tell us that people don't read web pages, or don't read much of the text on the page. A big "click here" helps in that case, a call to action as another commenter wrote. As long as the page or email just has one call to action.
Yeah, this sounds nice in theory but "For additional order details, go to _your account_." doesn't explicitly answer the question of how to go to your account, which will not be obvious to many people.
From the examples, I don't think it's good to bury the link in the content text either, at least some of the "click here" at the paragraph end is very clear and stand out.
However, the alternatives suggested are harder to translate.
The need for the link text to say the action or name of destination of the link, and to grammatically fit within the sentence, makes translation tricky.
Poorly translated sites are hard to use for the majority of the world for whom English is not a first language, and overall this effect might outweigh the benefits of descriptive link text.
> But people won't know where to click? It's not 1995.
In 199x it was easier to tell were to click on a web site - hyperlinks were underlined and usually blue. On many modern sites links are de-emphasized; different sites using very different styles doesn't make it easier.
Good advice! A rule of thumb I use is that the sentence should make sense if it was read outside of a browser, which results in roughly the same thing.
but if the sentence makes sense outside of the browser where there is no place to click, why should the sentence read the same inside the browser where there is a place to click?
your (collective) POV doesn't need to be explained to me, I get it, it's a fun little intellectual puzzle to write a sentence which works both ways and magically the user intuits that clicking is the thing to do, but none of that says the other way is wrong. People choose to do it the other way because it makes sense to them. Who are you to say "no, it doesn't make sense to you"
It's hard science as far as accessibility goes. A screen reader user wastes a lot of time if they have to differentiate what 10 different "click here" links mean.
i'm sure if you published the hard science here, all sorts of holes could be poked in it. this idea that deciphering what links are clickable wastes time is nonsense and probably brought to us by primitive AIs that are measuring how many ads per second they can get the multitudes to click on.
people who make their own pages invariable "click here" and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
A few months back a proud father posted his daughter's first website that she made herself and it was all "click here" and not a single person either told her off or complained about the waste of time.
Maybe you don't understand what accessibility is? It's not a vibes-based term like UX, there are actually laws that enforce proper accessibility. If you run a big American website that isn't accessible, you could get sued under the ADA.
While I agree with the authors sentiment and do try not to include 'click here' links in any of the content I'm asked to post. I disagree with his assertion that it's confusing and slows people down.
Having been on the Internet almost daily since the late 90's. I can say with some degree of certainty that the ambitiousness of 'click here' links on the Internet has more or less trained people to look for them.
In the authors example
Jcrew email receipt
For additional order details, please click here to go to your account.
For additional order details, go to your account.
Not only do I immediately understand 'click here' to go to my account, but 'click here' conveys that the link will deep link me directly to the referenced section or pertinent information that the sentence is discussing.
Alternately a 'your account' link, does not convey this message. It tells me I am going to a general account management interface, and will then need to browse around to find the information or section referenced by the sentence.
I believe 'click here' links have their place and convey the very specific message that they should deep link someone directly to the content referenced in the link and not just to a site that contains the referenced content somewhere on the page.
I'm generally with the author on this, but their examples are inconsistent. I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase. We want the user to do something (click here), and verbs are "do words."
So, instead of
For additional order details, go to [your account].
use
For additional order details, [go to your account].
(The author does this inconsistently.)
And in this case:
To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].
You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.
they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."
Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like
[Review or adjust your AutoPay settings]
I saw this the other day:
The link went to the article and not the Times home page. That bothered me more than it should have.You were completely justified in your botheredness.
>I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase
I would disagree. Links are references to resources, not actions (assuming your link isn't a POST request).
Example:
For additional order details, go to [your Account page].
See also wikis.
This is exactly the sort of article that reminds me of how full of themselves SO MANY people in web design are. It's why I never take anything any "strong" so-called UI/UX expert ideas or notions or whatever particularly seriously, and instead actually listen to the client (not what they say they want, but what goals they actually have)
In this case, the client is my 70ish dad and the people he interacts with for his project. Last thing I'm going to do is be like "no, it's not 1995, people don't need 'click here' this anymore."
People who write articles like this keep people like me in business.
Amazingly, this has been the recommendation for at least the last 27(!) years: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/be-succinct-writing-for-the...
People who headed that advice benefited from better human usability and improved "SEO" performance due to keyword relevance.
Web tools should have warnings about "click here" text in the same way they do syntax errors.
Around 1994, I'm pretty sure I saw ordinary simple "how to make a Web page" tutorials that told you specifically not do "here" or "click here" links.
You were to instead make the link around relevant text.
(Also, early people often got hypertext just fine. The problem was print designers, who kept wanting to make the Web be glossy brochures. At first, they'd try things like making the whole page a GIF/JPEG, and would get laughed at, but they soon took over what a Web browser is, for the entire field. Over the decades, they'd then slowly rediscover ideas that were there from the beginning, and give them names like "responsive design" and "accessibility", and write books about them. On Monday, I had to battle with a Web site framework, to force something exotic called "server-side rendering", and also to make an `<a href=URL>` element be a hypertext link that the Web browser loads as a Web page when the user chooses to follow the link.)
Amen. Graphic designers with a background in anything print have been a huge hindrance to the web. After a long time in the wilderness of single-page apps and framework, I see at least some small cracks of light where people are recognizing how simple/useful pages (e.g. McMaster-Carr) can be the most "beautiful".
Jakob Nielsen’s advice is, to put it politely, not “the recommendation” but rather “someone’s recommendation.”
It wasn’t just Nielsen saying this. Pretty much anybody who knew anything about usability or accessibility was telling people not to use “click here” for links since the 90s, and once Google arrived with PageRank, SEO people started saying the same thing. This has been best practice for at least a quarter century for multiple reasons.
Google developer style agrees, and encourages the following alternatives instead:
- Make the link text match the exact text of the title or heading that you're referencing.
EX: For more information, see [Load balancing and scaling].
- Write a description of the destination page to use as the link text, capitalized as if it's part of the sentence.
EX: You can use Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Functions to manage [task scheduling on Compute Engine].
https://developers.google.com/style/link-text
This is ironic because supposedly Google also penalizes links which are "keyword stuffed".
Ha, I've never thought about that! Although when I'm writing tech docs stuff like SEO isn't usually top of mind :P
Norman Nielsen Group makes similar arguments against "learn more" (and suggested that "learn more" is the new "click here"): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/learn-more-links/
> But people won't know where to click? > It's not 1995.
I've seen lots, lots of people living in 1995 these days then.
It's a bit jarring (but not in a bad way) to read "It's not 1995." on a page that uses no JavaScript, no images, and where the only styling is "body { width:650px; }".
On the other hand:
"Click here" screams "this is a link". It is not as obvious a call to click upon as a big shiny button, aching to be pressed, but it is more obvious than a few words that are in a harder-to-read color and underlined.
"You can go to _your_account_" is a much smoother sentence than "To change your account, click _here_". But is that always what you want? Do you want all your links to be smoothly integrated into the body text? Sometimes you do! Sometimes you don't.
Maybe not so related, but the Spotify desktop client uses a link-styled piece of text after having downloaded an update — "click here to to update" — when you navigate to the updates menu, where I would expect a button instead of a regular link
Accessibility and universal design may be another important factor. I’ve recall that usage of “click here” makes it harder for screen reader users to tell what link they are trying to click on. I haven’t caught up with the tech in awhile, but such a small change/effort on my part has been ingrained into my link making!
Indeed: can you imagine attempting to disambiguate a list of links that all say "Click here" or "Read more"?
I think the better option is... why not both?
Update the first example to something like:
For additional order details, go to your account by clicking here.
and `go to your account by clicking here` is the link.
Agreed, and I think a lot of his reasoning falls apart if you look at his specific examples:
> What will I see if I click a link labeled "click here"? I have no idea. Instead, choose link text that describes the destination.
Pretty much all of the examples are of the form of "To do action XYZ, click here". Why aren't you considering the "do action XYZ" part of the sentence?
> It confuses search engines
No, it doesn't. As he said previously, "this is not 1995" - search engines also take into account the context around links and images.
Most importantly, though, these are all just this guy's feelings. While I think A/B tests definitely have limitations, this type of small change is the kind of thing that can absolutely be probed scientifically (i.e. A/B tests, formal user studies, etc.) If you're in a company where people are strongly arguing one side or the other of this debate, I'd just use the famous quote by Jim Barksdale: "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."
I agree. Click here also provides better context if the CSS doesn't clearly indicate a hyperlink or if the user is unfamiliar with html link styling, and in cases where the web browser veers into non-standard territory.
I would consider that to be as much poor styling choices as poor link verbiage choices.
Came here to say this. 3/4 of the arguments don't apply to a link that says "click here to x".
It only leaves "It focuses on mechanics instead of content", though I guess the weight of that will depend on the context?
If we're talking about links that pweform actions, then the mechanics already outweigh the content.
I would argue you can't win either way...
If you use real link, your training people to trust what the text says is actually where you're going to go..
By making people do extra work to see where click here goes you might actually be training to protect themselves... Of course that doesn't work when Outlook goes and wraps the whole thing in a safety URL you can't see past... Or with shorteners.. but in all of those cases, I know to be more cautious.
If you control the link text and destination, you probably want the user to trust it.
If you're designing software that displays links provided by untrusted third parties, that's beyond the scope of what this article is addressing.
> Outlook goes and wraps the whole thing in a safety URL you can't see past
That bullshit really needs to end. It's making people more likely to fall for phishing scams when they can't figure out the URL.
In Win98SE days, I setup a PC for my parents to use. It was their first computer, and I personalized it the way I setup mine: enable view extensions and path bar in Explorer, remove the Go button in IE, and so on.
Then I got a call from my Mom: "I typed in the web address, now what do I do?"
To me, it was obvious: hit Enter. But MS had done their A/B testing, and that Go button was for the beginning user.
For the OP to assume that everyone is as adept as they are is folly. As another user lamented, sometimes you have to rub the user's nose in it for them to know they can click something.
I believed this until I kept getting tickets about people not knowing where to click. So, we made links look like buttons, and stopped getting tickets. Then our designer didn't like the buttons, so the click here links were the only option.
People struggle with discovery, even though they shouldn't.
How were your links styled?
I ask because you say people struggle with discovery, but modern UI trends are all about simplifying and flattening, which comes at the cost of discovery.
I remember in the 90s, links were typically blue and underlined, maybe even bold? Links stuck out like a sore thumb. These days, that's considered ugly, and you might be lucky if links are even underlined.
Yes, this is a good advice for web spiders, but I don't believe it's a good advice for humans.
Even worse is to do both, e.g. click here to [reset your password]
At this point I'm just happy if hyperlinks are a different color
They should be underlined.
Welcome to the "hide-and-seek" philosophy of UX design.
Form over function.
Everything needs to look clean and uniform, discoverability be damned.
Looking nice in a screenshot is more important than being usable.
Just yesterday I had an instance of a user being confused by a link that would probably have made TFA's author happy. This isn't the first user to be confused by these supposedly-clearer links. I'm going to be adding a 'Click Here' text very shortly.
Ew. The examples in the 'Real Examples' look terrible, especially the last two. You usually shouldn't put links in the middle of a text. If you have a link and a description, rather use
The last example does it right, the example above it is almost right. And this holds even more on real websites, where the links are not underlined and blue.Some exceptions are hypertext heavy documents, like wikipedia, or a dictionary. But if you want to point somewhere, refer something, or provide an option to an action, you shouldn't put that in the middle of a sentence or in the middle of a line. Put it at the end.
> But people won't know where to click?
> It's not 1995.
I agree in principle with the article. But I have spent time reading help desk tickets so I know that average users often don't know where to click unless you push their nose in it. I can't count how many times users have said "I was afraid to click the link" or "I don't know where that button will go" because the UI presented links and buttons with meaningful titles instead of imperative commands. I just have to watch my parents try to navigate a web site to feel deep humility about how I think people use the web. They got stuck in 1995 I guess.
This kind of advice should come with A/B testing on actual users. I think we would all facepalm at the results.
Agreed. We have many "old" people that use our website and I can tell you for a fact that the "click here" is less confusing than some random blue link (which at this point has lost it's meaning because of seo keyword stuffing).
Not to mention "click here" is a call to action and a random blue link is not. Call to actions are important.
"It's not 1995" is really a terrible argument, because https://xkcd.com/1053/
You have people today who don't even know what a link is.
Well, it doesn’t help matters when CIOs berate us at town halls “the entire company blew up literally because someone clicked ONE LINK they shouldn’t have!!!!” and I’ve sat through many of those “blame the user” sessions.
Two factor has resulted in similar berating. “How dare someone click APPROVE at 2am?!” Well, they were trying to silence the phone when they were attempting to sleep. Why are you allowing pushes outside of business hours without an additional layer of security? Maybe that giant APPROVE button isn’t the best default option at 2am?
Sometimes you can't win. I worked on a site that had what I call a punitive UI -- buttons and links that would throw up a modal alert telling users they shouldn't have clicked on that. When I started changing the UI so users didn't see controls/links they shouldn't click on, users complained that "the web page changed," as if they had memorized exact pixel locations and I caused their confusion. Pigeons pecking at the green dot.
Numerous studies tell us that people don't read web pages, or don't read much of the text on the page. A big "click here" helps in that case, a call to action as another commenter wrote. As long as the page or email just has one call to action.
Yeah, this sounds nice in theory but "For additional order details, go to _your account_." doesn't explicitly answer the question of how to go to your account, which will not be obvious to many people.
From the examples, I don't think it's good to bury the link in the content text either, at least some of the "click here" at the paragraph end is very clear and stand out.
However, the alternatives suggested are harder to translate.
The need for the link text to say the action or name of destination of the link, and to grammatically fit within the sentence, makes translation tricky.
Poorly translated sites are hard to use for the majority of the world for whom English is not a first language, and overall this effect might outweigh the benefits of descriptive link text.
> But people won't know where to click? It's not 1995.
In 199x it was easier to tell were to click on a web site - hyperlinks were underlined and usually blue. On many modern sites links are de-emphasized; different sites using very different styles doesn't make it easier.
Missing a great source of humour to have the Hacker News headline link "click here"
Good advice! A rule of thumb I use is that the sentence should make sense if it was read outside of a browser, which results in roughly the same thing.
but if the sentence makes sense outside of the browser where there is no place to click, why should the sentence read the same inside the browser where there is a place to click?
your (collective) POV doesn't need to be explained to me, I get it, it's a fun little intellectual puzzle to write a sentence which works both ways and magically the user intuits that clicking is the thing to do, but none of that says the other way is wrong. People choose to do it the other way because it makes sense to them. Who are you to say "no, it doesn't make sense to you"
Idk why, but I prefer click here version
I dunno, seems pretty clear to me and it’s a super common approach.
Is this science or just kind of a style question?
It's hard science as far as accessibility goes. A screen reader user wastes a lot of time if they have to differentiate what 10 different "click here" links mean.
i'm sure if you published the hard science here, all sorts of holes could be poked in it. this idea that deciphering what links are clickable wastes time is nonsense and probably brought to us by primitive AIs that are measuring how many ads per second they can get the multitudes to click on.
people who make their own pages invariable "click here" and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
A few months back a proud father posted his daughter's first website that she made herself and it was all "click here" and not a single person either told her off or complained about the waste of time.
Maybe you don't understand what accessibility is? It's not a vibes-based term like UX, there are actually laws that enforce proper accessibility. If you run a big American website that isn't accessible, you could get sued under the ADA.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/
>Maybe you don't understand what accessibility is?
and you think "click here" disrupts accessibility, and the elimination of "click here" enhances it? poppycock.
Maybe you don't understand what accessibility is.
Nice. Anyone have a list of these single issue PSA static sites?
But using old 90s ux is so satisfying
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