At the risk of turning this blog into another ‘Web Sites That Suck’ here’s a link to a typical posting at the Digital Photography Blog:New Nikon DSLR Coming Soon
This site is a fairly useful aggregator for material posted at other sites. They post a short summary of the article and then link to the original site.
The problem is that I can never find the link on the page that takes me offsite to the full article. (In the interest of full disclosure I would like to state that I am an idiot. And it’s this quality that leaves me uniquely qualified to comment on this kind of issue).
There are far too many links on the page. Or rather it appears that way because there is very little visual separation to indicate what is specific to the article and what’s generic links, adverts or site navigation. So I’m scanning through the muddle of similar text trying to spot something that might be the link to the actual article.
The reason I can’t find it is that they’ve chosen to link the article title itself to be the link. I’m expecting to find something underneath the summary not on top of the summary.
And no matter how many times I visit the site I can’t train myself to click on the article heading as every other blog I visit trains me to look for a link at the bottom.
One of my favourite bits of UI design advice (mainly because it annoys people that think they must be ‘creative’ in designing an interface) is ‘Do what everybody else is doing’. If you fail to heed this advice either because you think you know better or because you think you need to differentiate yourself on principle, then your visitors will have to continually re-learn the habits they’ve formed in the other 99.999% of the web.
Related posts:
On a similar note, check out http://www.usabilitynews.com
Every single article links to another page. This main link is way below the body of the article (which itself may contain links), and is labeled “associated link”. The link text is also smaller than the article body text.
I wonder how many people fail to click on the main link as a result. Lots, probably.
Yep. I don’t like the Usability News layout. (I wonder if they did any user testing. snigger.)
Boing Boing does something similar but their link is nearer to the body of the article (plus I’ve got used to it now)
Slashdot tends to use the first link the body of the text to link to the related article.
My thought is that there should be a clear link between the title and the body of each article. Any other opinions?