Vin Thomas on January 7, 2010

Great article! I am fully behind you on this!

Micheal Foley on January 7, 2010

Thanks for writing about this in such an informed way! As an editor, I see “click here” quite a bit and it’s one of my biggest pet peeves (as is anything from the Department of Redundancy Department).

mr. diggles on January 7, 2010

trust me, i fully agree with this – however, people are retards. while it is best practice to minimize mundane instructions, providing clear guidance will always improve results. even if it is gross and comes across stupid.

Micheal Foley on January 7, 2010

mr. diggles: I think excellent design IS a form of clear guidance.

Daniel Wood on January 7, 2010

I need to be better at this. It seems so obvious now; I want to go through and clean up all of my posts.

Carlos del Rio on January 7, 2010

“Click Here” is an important call to action.

While I understand your aversion to seeing it over and over again during the day it has an essential value for the vast plurality of potential users. Just because super users of the Internet are aware of the redundancy doesn’t mean now is the time to pull up the ladder.

Only 1 in 4 people world wide have access to the Internet:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

It is neither inaccurate nor insensitive to design with 75% of the world population in mind.

Tyler Sticka on January 7, 2010

The purported necessity of the phrase “click here” in hyperlinks is contradicted by its apparent absence from nearly all the world’s most-visited web sites. Essential destinations for new users such as search engines, content portals and Wikipedia are almost completely devoid of this instruction.

Surely if it were so essential for the acclimation of new users, it would not be so unanimously rejected by sites with a global audience numbering in the hundreds of millions?

Michael hit it on the head. The challenge of design is not to seek out confusing interactions and append instructions to them, but to create a seamless experience that is as effortless as humanly possible.

Amazon’s “View Cart” button is large and prominently placed. It has an accompanying ‘shopping cart’ symbol. It is rendered with dimension to play on our idea of a physical button. This dimension appears glassy or shiny, enticing us on a very deep, almost primal level. Its purpose is immediate and requires no explanation.

A blue underlined text link reading “Click here to view cart” would have been inelegant and, if not ineffectual, certainly less effectual.

Kurt Morris on January 7, 2010

I find myself agreeing with everyone here…sorta.

I *hate* the use of “click here” and hyperlinked “here” in the course of text on a website for all the excellent points you raise. These same points have been made for over 10 years, but seem to be paid as little heed now as then.

However…

Tyler, I understand your qualification of “click here” to mean hyperlinks in text. mr. diggles and Carlos, however, touch on key points: Outside of the flow of text, the “click here” phrase is extremely effective when used as a direct “call-to-action”, and I get constant validation of this statement from user testing we do on our site (~3MM UV’s and ~100MM PVs/Mo).

We’ve proven in “Click Here” on buttons and “buy” links, and that phrase continues to beat out variations by a significant margin.

On a related note, we almost invariably get comments from new designers we hire that our emails are too long, with comments like “Nobody ever reads that far” or “minimalist/simple design is much more effective”, but have proven time and again that our story-length messages with several “click here” buttons continue to outperform — by far — other test approaches.

And while I think you make a decent argument regarding the world’s most trafficked sites, I’d caution that using such as a benchmark could be misleading: Among these sites are search engines and social sites that depend less on direct marketing than many of the sites that you or I may be working on. OTOH, one of those top sites is Amazon, and many of their direct marketing efforts include the phrase “click here” (Google reports over 4 million such instances on the Amazon site alone: http://bit.ly/69WrWW.)

Al of this is to say, as designers, we must _continually_ question our own assumptions. Yes, good design is a challenge, and we must make things as clear as possible for the largest number of visitors to our site(s). But I’ve found time and again that *good* design and *effective* design are not always the same thing.

Kelly Guimont on January 8, 2010

If for no other reason, “click here” is losing its effectiveness because when I use my phone, I don’t click anything. As touch technology and other sorts of interaction methods become more common, the act of clicking will become less common and usage will hopefully start to drop off organically. At least, I like to think so. (:

Kurt Morris on January 9, 2010

Good point Kelly, but do you “touch” a phone number or “dial” it? Although I am (sadly) old enough to have used dial-type phones, whole generations have never done so, yet we still refer to the act of inputting a phone number as “dialing”. We also still refer to things like “carriage returns” and “horsepower”, and GUI metaphors such as “clipboard”, “paste”, “folder”, and “desktop”.

For all we know, “click” may be here to stay, but only time will tell.

David Stalder on January 9, 2010

Very good points, Tyler. I don’t usually think it’s necessary, either.

But to add to Carlos’s point, what about all the people (even in internet-common countries) still learning how to use the internet? Unlike cars — which may legally be driven only by people who’ve passed training periods and exams — the internet has no knowledge or training prerequisites for use. My grandparents were in their 80s when they started learning how to use computers and go online; even things like moving the cursor around were brand new to them. “Click here to…” in certain key contexts (such as helping a user navigate to an important page) could be valuable to those who aren’t used to recognizing differently colored text in the middle of an already confusing webpage.

I’d also ask about people who are color-blind; when the primary text on a webpage is gray (such as in this article), and a given hyperlink isn’t underlined, isn’t the blue text hard to distinguish from the rest?

I suspect that mobile users on the web have probably all learned what “clicking” means, and have internalized the term to the point where they don’t need to think about it. I may be wrong… Does Kelly disagree?

Kurt, we can add the email term “Cc” (carbon copy) to your list of terminology derived from items used primarily in earlier contexts.

Tyler Sticka on January 10, 2010

I’m completely sympathetic toward content creators who employ the phrase as a result of clear, honest-to-goodness audience-centric data that proves conclusively that the majority of a user base responds more favorably with a prepended instruction. That being said, I would passionately suggest that these instances represent an infinitesimal fraction of the phrase’s usage. Typically “click here” is a symptom not of research and critical thinking, but of unfamiliarity.

When you purchase a portable media device such as an iPod or Zune, there is almost always an element of the packaging (sometimes even affixed to the device screen itself) instructing the user to attach the included USB cable or power adapter, and plug it into a USB port or electrical outlet for its initial charge. This instruction is included because the action is unintuitive, outside a certain amount of designerly control and ultimately unrelated to the regular act of interacting with the product.

There is no equally obvious instruction for how to control music playback, navigate your library or edit settings, despite the fact that many of these interfaces are much newer (and more foreign) than the basic conventions of web browsing.

The principal methods of interaction in any experience should be intuitive and nearly immediate if they are to be used and re-used continuously. A user will be required to click hundreds of hyperlinks in order to accomplish even the most mundane of web-based tasks, rendering the vast majority of these instructions redundant.

How likely is it that your product will be your audience’s introduction to the Web? If your site exists to promote Twitter and Facebook integration in Bing search results, I’d say not very.

Side note: One issue I only hinted at (in my reference to accessibility for screen readers) is the fact that device-centric instructions like “click here” are not semantic, and are therefore hurting the Internet. Having taught Web Standards courses at the Art Institute of Portland and presented on the topic at several conferences, I’m afraid a detailed tirade on the importance of accessibility would only derail this discussion.

David Stewart on January 10, 2010

Amen, bruthah. I’m also campaigning to get rid of call to action arrows and buttons. Unlike click here, they sometimes serve a purpose. However, sometimes they don’t. I didn’t realize it until someone pointed it out to me but the Apple site has almost no arrows on it’s site.

Arrows become such a strong visual element and they sometimes overwhelm the design. I think the overall message is that we need to start rethinking some of the design elements leftover from Web 1.0. Click here, “the fold”, blue links, buttons, arrows, aliased text (or is it non-anti-aliased), and the like are from a bygone age where technological limitations dictated design.

—David

Matt Mikulla on January 20, 2010

David,

I believe Kurt nailed it above by pointing out testing proves what is and isn’t effective. We now have free tools like google website optimizer. Our opinions don’t matter. What matters is influencing our users to take action and how best to achieve that.

Apple may not use arrows on their buttons but I certainly hope they have tested with arrows. One minute change, arrow, no arrow, button color, etc. could mean the difference of millions of dollars for a site like amazon or apple.

luigis on January 21, 2010

Tyler — bravo for rooting out this redundancy. For us copy editors, doing so is as enjoyable as eating our favorite dessert!
I’m sure some would argue that I’m oversimplifying the issue, but I like to use my mom as the litmus test in these cases. She’s 71, and has been a Mac user and an avid Web surfer for years (arguably giving her the advantage over other seniors who might not be able to distinguish a desktop computer from a blender – but then, they aren’t part of the audience we’re concerned with anyway, right?). If my mom wouldn’t need to see the words “Click here to …” to know what to do, then who would?

RFID Reader on April 16, 2010

great experience, dude! thanks for this great post wow… it’s very wonderful report.