Day 3 - Link labels
After the page title and headings come link labels. If you really want to get a feel for what a page has to offer and you can’t see the visual layout, getting a list of links can give us a signal of what the page has to offer and get to your next step.
Link labels
Imagine only being able to see the list of links and their labels alone on a page. Would you be able to discern what options are available? Imagine you could not read the surrounding sentence for context. This means if you have a bunch of “click here”, “view” or “details” labels, it is forcing someone to read the surrounding context to understand what each link does. Imagine if that takes 10 seconds per link and you have 15 links on the page, that is an extra two and a half minutes spent figuring out what next steps are available that could have been spent on those and subsequent steps!
Link labels are short, descriptive and are able to stand alone to provide enough signal to visitors of their intent.
Screenshot of Mac OS VoiceOver link list
By checking one of the sites I oversee (example above), the labels look pretty clear. This site has a mix of menu items, news articles, events and departmental resources. Resist the urge to make the labels overly robust, “map” for example could be re-labeled as “View map of location” but are the extra words adding clarity? Sometimes less is more.
Task
- Install the browser extension on Firefox (sorry I couldn’t find a Chrome alternative) which opens a sidebar and lists all the link labels on the page
- Review the labels of the links to determine if there is enough context to allow each to stand alone
- If you have any link labels that are full, or even partial URL, reconsider if there is a label that makes more sense to describe the link
- Repeat this process for your top pages or as many pages are you can get to in 20 minutes
Tools
- LinkListSidebar Firefox extension
- (Couldn’t find a good Chrome version to pull all link labels on a page)