Links vs. buttons
Posted: April 26th, 2009 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Good practices, VS | Tags: actions, buttons, links, submit | 3 Comments »When dealing with webpages, some usability experts say we should use links when the user is gonna get on a different page and buttons when the user makes an action.
I don’t really care. I don’t care because users don’t care.
Let’s get things a little further, what’s a button? Does it have to have borders? Different color?
Is a icon followed by a link really a link or a button? I see those things like buttons, others see it like “fancy links” or “descriptive links” or “visual links”.
One thing i agree with, though: forms should have “hard to miss” primary action button, you cannot put a link there mainly because it will not be a “primary action”, there are other links on a page so the weight of a “submit link” won’t be so different.
Really liked the article by Luke Wroblewski on previous and next actions in web forms http://www.uie.com/articles/previous_next_luke
Thank you, really good article.
I agree, good points.
One thing to be mindful of is that buttons will be in the natural tab order of the page. Whilst links will not (in many cases), so will need a little extra work to enable keyboard navigation.