More about links
I thought I had pretty much covered problems with links to watch out for, but a couple of sites I have encountered recently suggest that some points could do with expansion. In that earlier column I made the following point:
[T]he link should give you some idea of where you are going to end up…
At the time I was thinking primarily of sites which use “Click here’ for text links, and there are still plenty which do that. Most of the time, you should realise, links stand out from the surrounding text because of their colour and, usually, by being underlined. Having the words “Click here” leap out at the user’s eye is not particularly helpful.
However, there is more to this point than I realised, largely because there were some bad design approaches which I had not come across at the time, and which I would never have imagined anyone would be stupid enough to use.
Don’t surprise the user
Think for a moment about what users expect of a hyperlink. With the exception of certain special cases, which are generally pretty clearly labelled (downloading software, displaying a video of some type, etc.), users expect a hyperlink to take them to another Web page or elsewhere in the current one.
Usually that Web page will be just that: an HTML document, either written as such or generated on the fly by software on the server. Occasionally, it might be an Adobe Acrobat PDF document — in which case a sensible Web designer will warn his users of that fact before they click on the link.
If you, as the designer of a Web page, decide to do something entirely different then you are confusing the user and are likely to find that they are not pleased by this. Expect them to leave in irritation at best; at worst, it might be the start of a flame war.
The something entirely different I am thinking of is downloading a file to the user’s computer without any indication that this might result from selecting the link. This is something which will rightly infuriate many users — you have not given them any choice in the matter, but tricked them into downloading a file.
Now you might say, “Looking at any Web page involves downloading it”, and that is true — but there is a big difference between a browser downloading an HTML document to its cache in order to display it and the unsought downloading of an unknown file to the computer’s hard disk. If it is an .EXE file, it is especially bad since running an unknown executable file is a good way to get a trojan in your system (and Windows has such effective security features, doesn’t it?).
However, executable file or not, this is still a fairly rude trick on the part of the Web designer. The most recent example I came across combined that rudeness with remarkable stupidity.
In a very plain Web page, something like eighteen links were gathered in a couple of tables. The links seemed completely routine — links to other pages covering the subjects stated in the link text. I clicked on one — and immediately the browser’s Download Manager opened up: the site had started to download a file with the extension .PPT. Quite irritated, I hit “Cancel”, and then thought about it.
In the first place I was irritated at the mere fact of the link starting a download without any warning; I was even more irritated because the file was well over a megabyte in size. Security was not much of a concern, since this was clearly a file generated by a Windows user and I was not running a Windows box. The extension puzzled me a bit, since it seemed familiar but I could not remember what it meant. Eventually, I looked it up: PowerPoint.
Now think about the crass stupidity of this: instead of putting the information in an HTML file which the site’s visitors could access using their browsers, the designer had put it in a file format requiring a particular piece of software.
How many people have PowerPoint on their computers? How many of those who do have it on their computer are at work where they can’t download anything? What about people using platforms for which PowerPoint is unavailable? I was a bit irritated; if I were fairly new to computing I would have been furious to have waited while megabytes of data were downloaded to leave me with a file that was completely useless to me.
As I’ve noted, a user clicking a link generally expects to end up on another Web page; the last thing they expect is to get a file in a very program-specific format downloaded to their hard drive.
If it is necessary to use a particular file format — which it might be, although nothing about that site suggested any great need for PowerPoint — then this should be made absolute clear in the link, as in this example (dummy link):
More on this subject…
(Downloads PowerPoint file [1.5Mb])
Link confusion
Even when creating simple text links to HTML pages, though, it is still easy to bemuse the user if you are not careful. Take a look at this menu:
Home
Politics
World
Focus
On Art
Science
In The
Office
That menu contains how many items? Are there eight? Six? Five? “Home” and “Politics” are two items. What about the next three lines, though — is it “World”, “Focus” and “On Art”, or “World Focus” and “On Art”, or could it be “World” and “Focus On Art”? Do we have an item on “Science in the Office” or items on “Science” and “In the Office”?
This confusion is so easy to avoid: inserting a couple of line breaks between each item makes the situation much more clear:
Home
Politics
World
Focus
On Art
Science
In The
Office
This is another illustration of the point I frequently make: although you, the designer, know what is going on in your page, a user who has never seen it before may well be very puzzled.
That example, by the way, is not the most egregious possible way of confusing the user. I have seen a couple of sites where the navigation is in a paragraph, like so:
Home Politics World Focus On Art Science In The Office
Work that one out.
The ultimate point, as always, is that users who have never seen your site before need to be able to grasp quickly the way it works. The single most important thing is that the navigation system is clear: it must be obvious what is a link and what is not, there must be information about what will happen when links are activated, and it must be easy to distinguish one link from another.
If users find it difficult to tell where links are and get confused about what happens when the links are clicked because of poor design, they are not going to stick around for long. There are always other sites for them to visit.
© DC 2000. All rights reserved.
