“Click here to…” a poor user interface practice

Posted 10/01/2009 in: Web content publishing | 0 Comment | Permalink

As I was evaluating the content of a web site for one of my clients, I noticed that she would always use the phrase “click here” when linking to another page. This is not a good practice in user interfaces.

User interface studies have shown that when people first browse a web page, they look at page headlines, paragraph heads, and links first. “Click here” does not tell them what the link is about. They have to continue reading to find out.

It is much more efficient to have the link be a few words that tell the user what the link does. Another benefit of this approach is that search engines’ “crawler” programs will almost certainly recognize these words as keywords for the web site.