“Learn More” links are a problem | Hacker News Reader

“Learn More” links are a problem

nngroup.com

39 pointsprawn17 comments

I wonder whether the trend began as the amount of low quality click-bait on the web increased. 'Learn More' maintains a purposeful ambiguity - if users have read the summary, they're likely to have a fairly good idea of what they are reading about and whether they want to know more about it.

If there is not much more content to actually be seen in the article, it works in favour of those producing quick and easy content to hit metrics as they won't be over promising.

I remember being taught never to use "Click here" (which has the same issues) about 15 years ago. It staggers me that in this day and age of responsive design and tableless layouts, we've still got the same old problems...

Wasn't Click Here proven to be effective in testing? I swear I read that at some point.

I always go with something like _Download the annual report (380KB PDF)_ rather than the client-suggested _Click here_ to download the annual report. But I think a combination was proven to be effective.

I remember reading that putting "click here" in banner adverts produced better click-through rates, as sad as it may sound. I can well believe that the same is true of links, though it ruins the page for screen readers (I went on some training for this once, which advocated link text exactly like your former example, and was told that its common practise for experienced people with visual disabilities to simply listen through the list of links to more quickly navigate to the information they need).

I guess an element of that would be down to the fact that a banner and (or image, in general) doesn't necessarily look clickable without "click here". Text links should always be able to avoid that problem, though.

Why is that sad? It's a very clear call to action, and is very unambiguous.

(I realize that it's probably less so when you start talking about accessibility, but I don't know much about that. :/)

On a related note, what people's take on using "read more" style links on blogs (especially ones publishing longer form content)? Meaning, the main list of articles on a blog shows the first few paragraphs of the posts, and then have a "read more, or "continue reading" link for the full article.

Does this make the blog's information more manageable, or is it also crappy design?

Trade-off, evidently. Better to get an overview of what the blog is about, worse to read the actual entries.

I personally dislike it very strongly. Reminds me of feeds without the full article, and means to generate clicks.

I was similarly opposed to those but then I found myself writing quite long posts and enabled "Read more" links for the sake of making the front page useful. Google searches return links to full articles anyway.

Why not just say something like "Read more about [link usability]" so you have the best of both worlds?

Because it's auto-generated by the blog software usually, at the cut point. Yes, you could make it an option, but then only the most careful %X would use it anyhow.

Well, speaking as someone who has pretty much gone full-on "nothing but 10 page+ essays" on my blog after starting with the snippet style when I first started, inlining all the content is impractical on the front page.

On a front page it makes sense because it allows you to review what's available, but when you've clicked through and are trying to read the article it's terrible. The New York Times pages are terrible for this, because they'll give you 200 or 300 words and then a Read More link which is sometimes below an interstitial ad. If I don't notice the link below the interstitial(which is usual on my smartphone) then I'll leave the article wondering how a journalist graduates from school totally unable to write a concluding paragraph. Another thing to consider is that the text of the article is dwarfed by the bandwidth and latency introduced by ad networks, so hiding parts of the article text to speed up page loads is counterproductive.

Personally I only like 'Read More' where when you click it, it doesn't load a new page, but instead just adds the rest of the article inline.

It is there to measure engagement. People who click the "read more" link are measured as engaged readers, and people who don't are measured essentially as bounces.

I doubt that it is there for a usability reason. The browser window effectively hides content in a standard and predictable way. Additional content hiding rarely improves usability.

I like the conclusions the author draws, but the proposed solution falls short of being a better alternative. The example replacements don't feel like links to me, nor do they offer much more information that what I would have expected from "learn more" coupled with the context of the headline.

If the destination page doesn't jive with the previous context, then that's a problem with the two pieces of content and the very notion of linking them, not the link text itself.

It's probably also worth mentioning 3D Touch and how it can help the problem.

Glad this wasn't called "'Learn More' Considered Harmful"

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