Guidelines for Visualizing Links

Guidelines for Visualizing Links (Link to the full report.)

Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability, though there are a few exceptions to these guidelines.

In my opinion, guidelines for links and it's visualization are verry important. It is very easy to get people confused if we make even the minimun and slight changes on how it looks. By changing the color, we can confuse people in two ways: They may get confused and not realize that it is a link or do not know if they had already visited the link or not.

In the other hand, do not use underline text or colored text in blue or red with underline, it will also confuse people and make them click on a word that is no a link and get confused, and it may cause them to leave the web site.