It's been my experience that the best (that is to say, most readily identified by users and least subject to confusion with other text) way to distinguish a link among text is to underline it. I don't really see "It looks messy" as a legitimate design concern if the goal is to provide information. The underlining makes a very clear "The information about this can be found if you select this text link"
I've also seen and tested a variety of other methods -- putting the links in a different color (tests out as harder to locate which text is linked) or a different typeface or type treatment (bold, or italic) and those have shown the fame problems.
I wouldn't even contemplate hover-based link finding. That relies on the user knowing that he basically has to swipe his pointer over the screen until he finds the text that's been linked. Why on earth would he bother?
Katie At 1:11 PM -0500 6/3/08, Huang, Yong wrote: Hello, folks,
We are currently working on an informational website, some pages of which contain a large amount of mixed text and links. We were discussing how to make links look like links among plain text. It will be messy if we blue underscore all links... We talked about hover underscore. I personally don't like this hovering over thing. If users don't feel like that is the link, how will they hover over it??? The only thumb rule in my mind is as long as we make the links look like links and users don't have to wonder if it is a link before they click it, it is a good design. Does anyone has been in the similar situation and how did you solve the problem? Using color contrast an option? Thank y'all ^_^ Yong
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