12 Writing Meaningful Links
This book is about information on the web much more than it is about getting around on web sites (web navigation). But navigation is also critical.
You’ve seen many examples of links throughout the book, especially in Chapter 3 on home pages, in Chapter 4 on pathway pages, and in the section on same-page links in Chapter 10 on headings. And I’ve promised several times to cover how to write meaningful, useful links. That’s what this chapter is about.
Links can be
Twelve guidelines for writing meaningful links
Use these 12 guidelines when you are writing links:
1. Don’t make new program and product names into links by themselves
Many organizations create new programs and new products with cute names. Once people know the name, it may make sense. It may even be memorable. But until people know what it means, it’s meaningless to them.
Why should people click on a link if they don’t know what to expect? Remember that your web site must serve new people not just those already in the know.
Both The British Museum (Figure 12-1) and the Colorado Historical Society (Figure 12-2) have links to something called Compass. Would you click on it on either site? What do you expect to find? Do you expect the same type of information in both cases?
Figure 12-1 People are not likely to click on links if the words aren’t meaningful to them in the context of that site. Don’t use made-up program names as links.
Figure 12-2 This screen has the same problems as the one from The British Museum – a link that uses only the program’s made-up name. It doesn’t explain what people will get by clicking on it.
The British Museum’s site called Children’s COMPASS has wonderful online tours of different parts of the museum’s collections and answers to many questions. It even has a facility that pronounces individual words or reads the entire text without the need for special software. But the “name as link” likely keeps all that great information hidden for many web users.
The same word, “Compass,” means something totally different for the Colorado Historical Society than it does for The British Museum. In the Colorado site, it’s a database used by consultants in archeology and historical preservation. And neither site seems to be using the word in its dictionary meaning of an instrument for determining direction. But how would web users know any of this without exploring each site? And are most users curious enough to do that?
Don’t start with the new name. Start with a descriptive link that is meaningful for your site visitors. If you want to use the name, introduce it in parentheses after the descriptive link or on the first content page – and show how the description and the name go together.
Acronyms often cause similar problems. Think about the broad public audience that may not know your acronyms. Even inside an organization, people typically don’t know all the organization’s acronyms. If some of your site visitors aren’t going to recognize the acronym, spell it out, especially in links.
2. Rethink document titles and headings that turn into links
An obscure title for a report, report section, or article causes problems both on paper and on the web, but the problems are far greater on the web.
In the paper world, people have the document in hand when they see the title. They can scan or flip through the pages looking at internal headings, charts, graphs, and text to understand how the title relates to the content. On the web, people first see the title as a link – by itself – out of context (Figures 12-3 and 12-4). They have to choose to click to get more.
If the title as a link isn’t meaningful, people who should click on it, may not. Result: frustrated potential readers who can’t find the information they want; frustrated authors whose work doesn’t get read.
Or the opposite may happen. People may click on the link expecting something totally different from what they get. In the paper world, the document is distributed only to the audiences for whom it was written. On the web, everyone may see the title. It may be on a web page they got while looking for something else. It may show up in a search.
You must think not only about the people who should choose the link to your information, but also those who should not choose it.
As a web content writer or editor, you may not control the titles of all the documents that you are turning into web pages. But take this guideline to heart and pass it on to the people who are writing those documents. You’ll be helping them relate to their audiences. You’ll be helping those audiences – and the document’s non-audiences. You’ll be saving yourself the work of having to come up with a description to clarify an obscure or misleading title.
Figure 12-3 Report titles become links on the web out of context. People don’t know what they will get until they click on the link.
Figure 12-4 Report section titles also become links on the web. How do web readers know which appendix has the information they need?
3. Think ahead. Match links and page titles
Report titles are only one example of the way that a page title turns into a link.
As people move through web sites, the first question they ask on each new page is “Did I get where I thought I was going?” They expect the page title to match the link they clicked on. Matching links and page titles is the best way to reassure your site visitors that they are on a good pathway or have gotten to the information page they expected.
To be successful in matching links and page titles, plan them in both directions:
Compare Figures 12-5 and 12-6. Which site makes you feel more comfortable and confident?
Figure 12-5 When links lead to pages with titles that do not match the links, people may be confused. They may back out thinking they got to the wrong page.
Figure 12-6 When links and page titles match, people feel confident they got to the page they expected.
This can get a bit tricky because you also have to think about consistency for both the link and the page title.
The web is in fact just that – a web – with ever-growing threads and tangles, so you may never know all the places where your page title will end up as a link. But you can strive for consistency and understanding of how your web page is linked at least in your own web site – and the larger web site it is part of if you are in a large organization.
4. Be as explicit as you can in the space you have – and make more space if you need it
When the web site of the U.S. National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, part of the U.S. Department of Education) had a link labeled Global ED Locator, usability testing showed that some people thought it led to a directory of department employees. In fact, it leads to databases of educational institutions – colleges, universities, and libraries. Making the label more explicit made all those databases much more available to site visitors.
Figure 12-7 shows the relevant parts of the “before” and “after” versions of the NCES home page.
5. Use action phrases for action links
Note that not only is the new link on the NCES page in Figure 12-7 more specific, it also starts with a verb. Verbs imply “doing” and much of the web is about “doing.’
In a study by Ann Chadwick-Dias and her colleagues at Fidelity Investments, web users, especially older adults, hesitated to click on links that were single nouns, like Accounts. When the Fidelity team changed the links to action phrases, like Go to accounts, web visitors of all ages were less hesitant about clicking on those links.
Consider the different links from the Chicago Sun-Times in Figure 12-8.
Figure 12-8 Action phrases (starting with a verb) make it easy to understand links that connect to what people come to the web to do.
6. Use single nouns sparingly; longer, more descriptive links often work better
Single nouns or short noun phrases can work as labels and as links for general categories and overall topics, but only if your site visitors categorize information as you do, recognize the nouns you use, and give those nouns the same meaning that you do. That’s why card sorting and other techniques for understanding how your site visitors would categorize and label your site’s information are so critical.
In many ways, the descriptive links that lead to specific information are just like headings. All the points from Chapter 10 apply. In Figure 12-9, from CNN Money, for example, you see a set of links that works as the table of contents to a long article. In this case, the statement links (like statement headings in a table of contents) work very well.
Figure 12-9 Think of links as headings. Reread Chapter 10. Statements and questions, as well as action phrases, connect well with web users.
Figure 12-10 Jared Spool and his colleagues found that links of 7 to 12 words achieved the highest success in getting people to the information they were seeking. (From Designing for the Scent Of Information, published by User Interface Engineering, www.uie.com.)
Longer links often work even better. Jared Spool and his colleagues found that the optimal length for links is 7 to 12 words. Figure 12-10 shows the pattern they’ve found between link length and success web users had in finding what they are looking for.
Spool suggests that longer links are more likely to have the words your site visitors have in their minds. Longer links have better scent. (See the discussion of “scent of information” in Chapter 4.)
Longer links are also more likely to be action phrases, statements, or questions, rather than single nouns or noun phrases. They are more likely to be like the headings that people look for and relate to.
7. Add a short description if people need it – or rewrite the link
Sometimes, you can’t get enough in the link itself to help people understand what they will get by clicking on it. In that case, you can add a short description with the link. Look again at the CNN Money page. Each link describing a fear has a short description explaining what the article is going to tell you is the real danger.
Also see the related discussion and examples in Chapter 4 on adding short descriptions to links.
A short description may be the only way you can help site visitors
Better solutions, however, might be to
8. Make the link meaningful – not Click here, not just More
Another reason for making the link itself be as useful as possible – and not rely on descriptions – is that as we come to a page, we tend to focus first on headings and links. They are colorful. They stand out. They draw our eyes.
Links that just say Click Here, Here, More, or Answer give no clue about what will come up if we click on them. They don’t allow us to separate one link from another. And they draw our attention away from the meaningful information.
The news section of the Toastmasters site (Figure 12-11) relies on Click here links, but if you read only the Click here links, you get very little useful information. The information is in the red headings that are not links. Compare this version to the suggested revision in Figure 12-12.
Click here is never necessary
Most web users today assume that something that looks like a link is a link. Years ago, Click here may have been a useful instruction; it’s not needed any more. Don’t announce links with Click here; just put what people will get by “clicking here” into your link format.
Figure 12-11 Most people see the headings in red first, but they must find the small blue Click here ... links to move ahead. And the first two Click here ... links carry no meaning.
Blind web users scan with their ears, just as sighted web users scan with their eyes. Screen-reading software helps them do this by allowing them to pull all the links on a web page into a separate list, as you can see in Figure 12-13. Can you imagine the frustration of listening when all you hear is Click here, Click here, Click here or More, More, More, More?
For more about how blind people work with web sites, see Theofanos and Redish, 2003.
More isn’t enough
More, More, More, More is useless to a web user who is listening. (You can add words to the alt text that screen-readers use, even if you have only More showing on the screen.)
But More by itself also isn’t helpful to sighted users who are quickly scanning the page. You can make links meaningful by
Figure 12-14 shows how Access Washington, a portal site, explains what you will get more of in each of its sections. Figure 12-15 shows how the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum in San Francisco, highlights meaningful words in its brief descriptions, rather than relying on More.
9. Coordinate when you have multiple, similar links
This is a guideline about more than writing or rewriting links. It’s a guideline about using links to understand and improve the content on your site.
Many organizations develop their web sites by allowing content owners in different departments to post information. If the same topic is covered in different departments, several explanations of the same topic may show up together as links on the web site. They may appear together on the same pathway page. They may all appear in search results.
Site visitors are likely to be confused. They would have to click on each of the links to know how the web pages are similar or different. What if the information in one contradicts the information in another?
As a first step, at least write short descriptions with the links to help people choose well. And then go beyond that. When you find that your site has several links that are hard to distinguish, don’t just rewrite the links. Take the problem of similar links as the impetus to clean up the content. That probably requires collaboration – writers from different departments working together to produce consistent, coherent information for your web readers.
10. Don’t embed links if you want people to stay with your information
To this point in the chapter, we’ve focused on links on home pages and pathway pages, where your primary goal is helping people move on.
Let’s turn to an issue for the information pages at the end of that pathway. As we discussed in the section on layering in Chapter 6, information pages also often include links – to more details or related information.
Recently, one of the hottest topics for one of my clients was this question: Is it okay to embed links in paragraphs of text or should you always put them at the end of the paragraph or even separate them from the other text entirely?
The answer, as with so many questions in creating successful web sites, is that it depends on your purposes, your web users, and why they are coming to your web site.
The point to remember is that an embedded link is always a distraction. If people choose to follow an embedded link, they leave your information in the middle of what you are saying. It’s like switching conversational topics in mid-sentence.
If people are just browsing, embedding may be okay
Most Wikipedia articles are full of embedded links. The page in Figure 12-16 is just one of thousands of examples I could have selected from Wikipedia.org.
Does having many embedded links work for Wikipedia articles because people most often come to Wikipedia in browsing mode? Are they eager to see how a topic branches and connects to many other topics?
But if you don’t want people to wander off in the middle, put links at the end, below, or next to your main text
If you want people to read your entire sentence or paragraph or article, don’t invite them to leave by embedding links in the middle of what you are writing. Otherwise you are muddling up two tasks for your site visitors: reading and moving on.
The chances of people coming back once they’ve been enticed away by a link are low. So put links where you are ready for people to take up your invitation to change what they are focused on. For example, compare Figures 12-17 and 12-18. Figure 12-17 is part of a page that I extracted from the section on spas at About.com. For Figure 12-18, I’ve moved the links to follow each small section of text.
Embedded definition links that open a small window and don’t change the entire screen are okay. They clarify the ongoing conversation; they don’t change the topic. (Look back at Figure 6-12 in Chapter 6.)
11. If you use bullets with links, make them active, too
Let’s end the chapter with two short sections on formatting.
In usability test after usability test, I’ve watched frustrated web users try to click on bullets rather than on the words next to the bullet. Whenever you use bullets next to links, make the bullets clickable, too.
12. Make both unvisited and visited links obvious
One of the basic principles of human behavior is that it is easier for people to work by recognition than by recall. Products should “afford themselves” – make it obvious how to use them – rather than require people to remember what to do.
Humans have limited short-term memory capacity, and in working on the web, your site visitors want to concentrate on their goals, not on memorizing links. Don’t make using your site more difficult by burdening people’s memory when you can help them by making links obvious and by indicating which links have been visited and which have not.
Use your unvisited link color only for links
Don’t use the same color for links and non-links. (Look again at the example from Toastmasters in Figure 12-11, where some of the red headlines are active links and some are not.) That teases your users, who don’t want to be teased.
People don’t want to have to rely on mousing around the page to figure out what is and is not a link.
Show visited links by changing the color
Nielsen and Loranger (2006, p. 60) list “Links that don’t change color when visited” as the first of eight original usability problems that continue to be serious web design flaws. They give it three skulls (the most serious condemnation, “still a high-impact usability problem”).
According to Nielsen and Loranger, 74 percent of web sites do change the link color for visited links, so people expect to be able to see at a glance which links they’ve already been to. When links don’t change color, people have to remember where they’ve been – and they often can’t remember. So they revisit the same link again (and often again), wasting time and effort. Or they skip the right link, thinking they’ve already tried that one.
Of course, the problem is made worse by links that aren’t clear and obvious. So writing your links to help people choose appropriately in the first place is critical. Even if your links are clear, help people understand what they have done and haven’t done on your web site by showing where they’ve been, that is, by changing color for visited links.
SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 12
Here are key messages from Chapter 12: