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Previous: Desk assembly warning | Main | Next: New York Aquarium website
August 24, 2006 12:02 AM
Broken: HP's non-underlined links
On this page, HP shows black text (non-clickable) and blue text (non-clickable).
Only if you look really closely, or hunt around by dragging your mouse around the page, can you tell that the text in between those colors, the blue-black text, is clickable. Since it's not underlined, there's no other way to tell that it's a link.
I know it's declassé for Web designers to underline links these days. (Heck, I should just be glad the text is black, not light gray.) But underlining does have that small benefit of allowing users to see where the links are. Users... remember them?
Didn't we have something similar to this quite a few months back? Glad to see there's "a slight preference for photos of places and products" like the 3 good ones I've submitted that never got used... Sigh.
if you are concerned about links being visible, how about just enabling the "underline links" feature in your browser's preferences?
if 120 people visit that page every day... and they each spend 1 minute turning 'underlined links' on... thats only 2 wasted person-hours per day! Which is 10 times longer than it would take HP to fix the problem.
It would take them 12 minutes to fix that? More like 3.
It most certainly does say "click here," like thylacine said. That makes it a heck of a lot less broken. Still broken, just not so much.
The way it is set up works fine for me, but then again, I'm used to that type of setup any more, and the slight color variations are also fine for me. I went to the site and at first thought whats the big deal, I can tell right off what is what, but then had to kick in the "less computer literate" thinking, and saw that it certainly could cause people problems. Not to mention the problems for those with eyesight issues.
It does say to "click here", like others have said. The only problem is that every place there is a link, it doesn't say to click here, so that's not much of a defense.
Icky looking, and not the most user friendly... broken.
i don't see that a person's unwillingness to discern between slight color variations to determine if something is a hyperlink is attritable to "computer illiteracy"; it's like, users go to the HP site to troubleshoot their printers, not to sit there and wonder what things are clickable. Don't users have enough to think about?
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Previous: Desk assembly warning | Main | Next: New York Aquarium website
There is a slight color difference.. but it's not enough of one. They do have the links listed at the end of the hypertext lines, fortunitly.
Posted by: Timber at August 24, 2006 12:15 AM