
“Learn More” links are a problem - prawn
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/learn-more-links/
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gloves
I wonder whether the trend began as the amount of low quality click-bait on
the web increased. 'Learn More' maintains a purposeful ambiguity - if users
have read the summary, they're likely to have a fairly good idea of what they
are reading about and whether they want to know more about it.

If there is not much more content to actually be seen in the article, it works
in favour of those producing quick and easy content to hit metrics as they
won't be over promising.

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sp8
I remember being taught never to use "Click here" (which has the same issues)
about 15 years ago. It staggers me that in this day and age of responsive
design and tableless layouts, we've still got the same old problems...

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prawn
Wasn't Click Here proven to be effective in testing? I swear I read that at
some point.

I always go with something like __Download the annual report (380KB PDF)__
rather than the client-suggested __Click here_ to download the annual report_.
But I think a combination was proven to be effective.

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sp8
I remember reading that putting "click here" in banner adverts produced better
click-through rates, as sad as it may sound. I can well believe that the same
is true of links, though it ruins the page for screen readers (I went on some
training for this once, which advocated link text exactly like your former
example, and was told that its common practise for experienced people with
visual disabilities to simply listen through the list of links to more quickly
navigate to the information they need).

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oneeyedpigeon
I guess an element of that would be down to the fact that a banner and (or
image, in general) doesn't necessarily look clickable without "click here".
Text links should always be able to avoid that problem, though.

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imrehg
On a related note, what people's take on using "read more" style links on
blogs (especially ones publishing longer form content)? Meaning, the main list
of articles on a blog shows the first few paragraphs of the posts, and then
have a "read more, or "continue reading" link for the full article.

Does this make the blog's information more manageable, or is it also crappy
design?

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onli
Trade-off, evidently. Better to get an overview of what the blog is about,
worse to read the actual entries.

I personally dislike it very strongly. Reminds me of feeds without the full
article, and means to generate clicks.

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TeMPOraL
I was similarly opposed to those but then I found myself writing quite long
posts and enabled "Read more" links for the sake of making the front page
useful. Google searches return links to full articles anyway.

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hammock
I like the conclusions the author draws, but the proposed solution falls short
of being a better alternative. The example replacements don't feel like links
to me, nor do they offer much more information that what I would have expected
from "learn more" coupled with the context of the headline.

If the destination page doesn't jive with the previous context, then that's a
problem with the two pieces of content and the very notion of linking them,
not the link text itself.

It's probably also worth mentioning 3D Touch and how it can help the problem.

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qntty
Glad this wasn't called "'Learn More' Considered Harmful"

