101 UX Principles

Chapter #24. Make Your Links Look Like Links

Links, or hyperlinks, are the basis of the web and were one of the key advances when Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML in 1989. In the original browsers, clickable links were blue, italic, and underlined. They looked gaudy and out of place, but that was the point: it was a brand new concept and users needed a way of telling a link apart from the rest of the text on the page.

Fast-forward to the present day and the practice of styling links has largely been abandoned in favor of only highlighting them when they're hovered over or, worse, adding no visual affordances to them whatsoever.

The style-on-hover approach is less than ideal: users on touchscreen devices have no hover state. Meanwhile users with ...