Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.

View on HN

Ben Shneiderman's the "hyperlinks should always be blue" guy. ;)

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811

Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc.

Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue".

Ben Shneiderman wrote:

>"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,"

>"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”

>"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted."

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

Ahh, memories. Ben was the advisor for my Master's thesis...

> He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.

I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.

I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.

In creating documents with hyperlinks for training students, I have found blue underlined still catches the most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting, different colors of underlining.

I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.

Honestly, I believe that the Web would have been better had we stuck to those expectations more diligently and evolved more slowly and thoughtfully. That one can does not imply that one should.

Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!

I don't disagree with the opinion, but what individual experts think does not factor in much when you have a groundswell of adoption like the web did. At that point people are going to hack whatever they can on top of it, and there are too many varied interests to have any central control, and so things just evolve well beyond the intent or control of any individual mind or architect.

For me, usability mattered a lot and I saw how a lot of the web design experimentation was falling short, but Nielsen was just too backwards looking. We needed forward thinking UX rooted specifically in web culture, and that's what we got through the Zeldmans, Veens, and 37signals of the era.

Blue and purple links wouldn't be visible on any website that chose to use those as background colors (or any range of background colors where the contrast would have been too low to be visible).

The web at the time was an "anything goes" multimedia format, not a dry digital paperback or textbook where all the content had to fit within the publisher's specifications to limit printing, weight and distribution costs.

Nowadays, most browsers have a "reading mode" that can flatten the content into something that satisfies those Nielsen conditions though.

> any range of background colors

Backgrounds should only be #808080

> Blue links and purple visited links were fine.

Red when active

“hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined”

this honestly make life so much easier...

I read it more as "blue and underlined" because if we all do that users have a chance at learning what to expect. With an implied: Once they are confident we can be much more flexable.

Why didn't he say the same thing about links:

> he was saying that each browser should define how headers would be displayed to their users.

And let the user define the color and underline style?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com