Identifying Links

There certain things that, as a frequent user of internet, you become accustomed to. Certain visual elements represent certain actions. A extremely good example of this is links. That felt click able, didn’t it? Google has a good approach to links. When clicked they appear purple and otherwise they are blue and underlined, just like we have become accustomed to them. Well, you would be surprised at how many people tend to forget that. I am not suggesting that everyone uses blue and purple for links but be cautious of how you identify them and how you treat items that are not links.

For example on the apple movie site, no hand appears when I hover over the icon to play back a particular trailer. This is confusing. Is that a link or not? If I click it nothing happens. Well, something is happening but it isn’t happening immediately. In fact, clicking 10 times will probably result in 10 quicktime movie players opening, which will probably result in a browser crash.