Website Design Guideline #7: Ensuring Links and Buttons Do What They Afford

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Affordance Simply Means that Something Behaves in the Way you Think it Should Behave. Good Affordance will Dramatically Improve the Usability of your Website and your User's Experience with your Brand.

Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You may have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they're looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you want them to do and difficult to get users to become loyal customers and revisit again and again.

Creating user-friendly websites begins by following the 14 Mequoda Website Design Guidelines for successful website design. By reviewing a site's score for each of the 14 items, along with the overall average score, the areas of the site that operate well, and those that need work, become evident.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 7: Ensuring Links and Buttons do What they Afford.

• Affordance is a term that simply means that something does what it looks like it will do, or behaves in the way that you think it should behave.
• For websites, good affordance means having clear, intuitive and logical navigation with no confusing or misleading links.
• If the user is expected to execute an action, use a button with a clear, unambiguous label, placed in a logical location for the desired outcome.
• Text links should be underlined and change in appearance once the user has visited that page.
• Many times, site pages or search results display so much information that it's difficult for the user to keep track of the pages already visited or articles already read.

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