In general, I'm very much on the side of having links either underlined or a distinct color. "Clean design" should never trump usability. Even if it takes a millisecond to figure out what's a link and what isn't, that's too long.
However, I do think their homepage works. It really is almost entirely links and I was hard pressed to find an instance of hesitation on my part. At least they are using underlines on rollovers which works. The problem is that the home page determines precedents for inside page styles and that's where the strategy starts to falter. Once you get a decent amount of content on a page, determining where links are does become more of a whack-a-mole situation (I believe that's the academic term for it). The designers realized this and they are using a distinct color for in-line links; those within a story. That's the area I'd expect the most difficulty finding a link. The biggest problem I experienced was on secondary-level landing pages (e.g., "Business") where story promo headlines are smaller than the excerpt of text below it. I suspect that's a CSS error for my browser (Firefox/Mac). If that were fixed, I would have expected those to be links. Overall, this solo user-tester found it to be a fairly usable design despite my prejudices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44633 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
