Don't use "click here" for link text
dont-click-here.com
dont-click-here.com
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.
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]
Covered in [The Whatever Times] was an article about something something,
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.
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.
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.)
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.
- 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].
I've seen lots, lots of people living in 1995 these days then.
"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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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're designing software that displays links provided by untrusted third parties, that's beyond the scope of what this article is addressing.
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.
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.
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.
Everything needs to look clean and uniform, discoverability be damned.
Looking nice in a screenshot is more important than being usable.
description : >Click here<
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.
> 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.
Not to mention "click here" is a call to action and a random blue link is not. Call to actions are important.
You have people today who don't even know what a link is.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
Is this science or just kind of a style question?
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.
and you think "click here" disrupts accessibility, and the elimination of "click here" enhances it? poppycock.
Maybe you don't understand what accessibility is.
> You can review or adjust your AutoPay settings at any time.
I honestly find the latter more confusing. It reads like documentation, so I'm primed to think that the link will take me to a documentation page about autopay settings rather than to my personal account settings. The former is very clear that it is prompting me to take an account action if I desire.