Recently while proofing a design I had created a colleague of mine asked “Why do we not use blue links?”, to which my immediate response should have been ‘Why should we use blue links!”. However, to avoid an argument I let him speak about how users were used to the standard blue links shown on web pages and anything else could confuse, but does it and can it?

As a designer I try to understand aesthetics and usability in equal measure in an attempt to produce the best user experiences for the websites I create. Blue links as a standard however, leave me in an uncomfortable place; these have been the standard in web design since the beginning, but just because something has always been this way doesn’t mean it should never change, surely?

In my opinion there are three factors at work here, these are:-

• History
• Design
• Usability

So I feel I should touch on each separately…

History

As I mentioned above the blue link has been part of the modern web for as long as I can remember, which has created an expectation in some peoples minds as to how links should be represented online. Having understood this and accepted this concept it still doesn’t change the fact that blue link was conceved by someone technical, a logical thinker or programmer whose main objective was to keep plain text and active content immediately and visibly separate, in a world were web design hadn’t been born and where options were limited. Blue is naturally a vivid display colour so choosing this colour to highlight links was an easy choice. Yet things have changed massively since then, visual displays have improved, the addition of images and interactivity altered the web beyond all recognition, so surely we can move on and create new standards?!

Design

The history segment above can be argued with I’m sure, but here in design the blue link is the enemy! (Well in my mind it is anyway). Over exaggerated colours, animated gifs and cramped content are now becoming a thing of the past, or more accurately a remnant of the 1990′s. When the Internet was born it was the playground for technical geeks who communicated and shared, the interface that this occurred within was simply not important. Now however, users are born into the Internet, schools actively encourage very young children to play online and it all seems to come very naturally.

Every step of this modern learning is down to how the pages look and react; would children be as inclined to learn about web pages if they all looked and behaved the same. Is it not also interesting how as design has become part of the modern web the older generation embrassed the internet at a similar rate, and could this mean they are learning in the same way? The aesthetics of objects are tremedously important and dictate how we humans behave towards all sorts of things like magazines, advertising,  foods, books and even other people, but when the web was in its infancy the way the web looked was a relative low priority, with technical leaps being the main focus. Now however, the technology has slowed and people are now able to take a moment to look at the internet in a different way, with that slower pace comes an opportunity to start advancing the web in different other ways than just technical, shoudn’t now be the time where we can creatively improve the aethetics of the internet while at the same time improving users experiences, in the same way as we have seen with all other products over the years.

Usability

With this in mind I looked at the BBC Cbeebies website, here there are no blue links or at least very few. This is where my daughter took her first steps into the web and with no special guidance has been able to navigate this website and many sites since easily and instinctively since she was 2 years old. So how has she grasped this so easily? Well the BBC have used interactivity, anything that can be clicked moves or changes making its purpose really obvious to the user, and not a hint of blue or even plain text to be seen. This method moves away from the trusted blue links convention and assumes that users hover around a page, anything that looks different or interesting automatically makes a user gravitate towards it, once some activity is displayed, you click! – makes sense really. So if users are able to intuitively learn how a page works quickly and the design actively helps prioritise content either with colour, images, animation or activity then why shouldn’t it? Young children can grasp this without any direction so why shouldn’t everyone else, maybe we just need to have a little more faith?

Conclusion

Obviously there can be appropriate uses for blue links and I think search engines are a great example of this, I just feel that as long as links are obvious either with using colour or images that add to a design, or activity that emphasis the link we should be able to move forward away from this early method without causing any degradation of user experience.

Let me know what you think…

Just  a quick post to mention the new iPad app ‘The Daily’ has been launched this week by News Corp;  with its reasonably cheap price and two weeks free offer Murdoch is looking to secure one million subscribers to make the project viable. However, the day after it was launched  the premium content offered by ‘The Daily’ was out there for free!

A programmer named Andy Biao spent a remarkably short amount of time creating a simple website displaying the newly indexed content for the app. According to Biao, a friend had noticed the content was visible to search engines and so decided to create the site; he feels that these are public articles and should be available freely on the web.

I think that this truly demonstrates that no matter how well large corporations try to control, funnel and sell their online wares there will always be somebody smarter trying to keep it open and free.  I personally am a great believer in a free world wide web, in a time of increasing red tape and bureaucracy this is potentially the last place where we can still be able to express our opinions and read about the world for free.

Interestingly the site is still live two days since its launch, let’s hope this is a win for the free web.  You can visit Andy Biao’s great work here

Recently I posted on my discovery of spoon.net, a service which allowed you to virtually run web browsers on a PC with no install for free. This service seemed to answer the cross-browser testing problem for all PC based web designers; until I re-visited the site again in the last few weeks and discovered Microsoft support had been stopped.

As I am a Mac based designer I hadn’t been using the service that often, so when I revisited the service to see if Mac support had been added I was stunned to see IE had been removed. I was greeted with a message explaining that they hoped to have IE support back soon, so I waited a few weeks and visited again, this time the message was a little more vague, it read ‘Come back soon for more information on how to use Internet Explorer with Spoon!’. So it would seem that Microsoft have pulled the plug and after doing a little research discovered that apparently it is to quote a phrase ‘violating Microsoft’s intellectual property rights’.

Just when something as user-friendly as spoon looked like curing the age old issue of cross-browser testing Microsoft come in with their size 9 boots and squashed the most important part of the service. Yet again Microsoft fail to make their already free software totally user friendly and web designers the world over will need to find alternative ways of checking their websites in all versions of IE.  What Microsoft fail to see is the bigger picture, this move will surely just help accelerate and compound the hate for all things IE and even Microsoft in an increasingly competitive browser market?

I personally hope spoon manage to overcome this ridiculous issue with Microsoft, or at very least Microsoft realise they are being so small minded it will ultimately be detrimental to their already floundering business.

Until then if anyone has discovered any great alternatives to the IE testing issue for both Mac and PC please let me know.