Forget Banner Blindness - Users are Blinded by Underlined Links

I certainly haven't conducted enough usability testing to be bold enough to say "underlined links are bad" - but I have seen a growing trend in our testing that makes me challenge the application of underlined links...

I think most would agree that the most important component of the interaction a user has on a page is their ability to identify links. We've come a long way from the classic red, blue and green - but I've found lately in testing that most users scan the page for their trigger words that identify a possible navigation route and they then look for the closest actionable link.

A trend I've noticed is that users are not impacted when links are not underlined, provided there is still some differientation or perceived affordance through colour, bolding or symbols to give them a hint that there is a link.

What bothers me most about underlining links is the fact that its often completely unnecessary and can actually negatively impact usability. Take a sidebar or left hand navigation - most users know instantly because of its relative location on the page that it is a site navigation area. Underlining sidebar or left-nav links only adds more clutter to the page, especially when you indent the navigation to illustrate sub-levels.

What's even worse is when links wrap multiple lines - in these scenarios I've seen testers completely miss trigger words that are in the middle of the link because they are blinded by the underline!

If you know of any research out there that speaks to the effectiveness of readability with underlined text, please let me know!

Comments

[Dmitry Nekrasovski]

Chris,

Good talking to you at the Kevin Cheng event last week. Fidelity's UX group did a study on this a few years ago and found that colour alone was insufficient and underlining worked best. It is not clear that their findings would still hold now, though, given that users are likely to be more habituated to non-underlined links.

http://hid.fidelity.com/q42001/links.htm

[Alexgkc]

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