This may be a case where changing design practices have “educated” website visitors in unintended ways. Once the visited link became a rarity, it also became less expected and understood by those it was intended to help.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad — just a different perspective.

If we as designers can’t come up with a color scheme that separates visited and yet-to-be-visited links without making the page “spotty” maybe we’d better go back to school. Sure it’s a challenge, but it should be part of standard practice. It’s only one more color in the palette.

We develop websites in Maine, USA, where the economy is tight and budgets are ALWAYS small. I guess I assumed it’s standard practice, as well as a good idea to put in the couple of lines of css necessary to distinguish between visited and unvisited links.

The customers I have worked with who have low web skills have all understood and expected visited links. The site size doesn’t matter; if the page has more than five to seven links in evidence, why wouldn’t we remind our visitors where they’ve been? If you don’t specifically style them, the browser may turn them purple anyway! Then they’ll really be spotty…

Our company’s habit is to leave the tab text links one color no matter what, but to color the tab/text when the visitor is in that section of the site (a “you are here” clue. Local navigation and inline content links get styled with “visited” colors. The only time I don’t do that, I can admit it’s laziness, time crunch, etc, not for a valid reason. Forums and ecommerce sites have more reason than others to color visited links, but I can’t think of nearly as many reasons not to provide them as I can to provide them.

I found this comment series interesting because it looks like the designers went with the em thing. No one ASKED us admins what we thought. The result has been people quitting their volunteer support over the boards.

The Lesson here is DO NOT DO ANY DESIGN CHANGE THAT IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT TO STANDARDS without doing a thorough usability test base first. Even the folks visiting the boards are complaining.

When you do research, you can visit the board multiple times a week. And you don’t visit one board but quite a few. I check over 50 boards every week. No way I can remember what I read and what I didn’t. The visited link was the way I knew quickly.

And the fact that aggravates the @#$% out of all of us — the fix is to make a simple change to ONE CSS file. And they won’t do it.

In modern, transactional websites the focus should rather be on consistency (use one name - ideally whatever your customers call it - for every individual page/section/product/etc and stick to it) and the context of the link - this should leave enough clues to the user as to what she will find if she was to click the link (and so help her make up her mind on whether it would help her achieve her goal).

It’s like how “About Us” and “Contact Us” became the de-facto standard titles for those pages, and it actually hinders users to name those pages anything else. Or having the boiler-plate legal pages linked to from the footer. Or having the logo in the upper left. And so on….

In my view, usability needs to assume that your site’s users visit other websites, and that their experience and expectations are determined by the internet as a whole.

There seems to be a couple of key points that keep coming through around the usability (as opposed to the design) of visited links:

Andrew.K asked :
Whether visited links should stand out more or less than the unvisited links.

Jermayne asked :
Whether it’s necessary to identify visited links on smaller sites.

I believe for design conventions to work effectively and in order to build trust in a system (be that the entire web or a single page website), there has to be consistency. If one site highlights visited links and another highlights unvisited links, how is the user to know which is which as they move from one site to the next…?

With regard to small verses large sites, I don’t necessarily think it makes a difference. It depends so much on the user and their needs in accessing information, the type of content on the site, and even the browser history settings.

With most things web, there are so many variables that surely a little consistency can only make things easier…

I’m aware that I’ve tended to let aesthetics or, to be honest with myself, just plain laziness gloss over this issue. And fundamentally, DylanButler has said it right.

As a partial defence…

There is the issue of commercial reality for designers of sites for small businesses or where the budget is ‘tight’. I go to some lengths to make my XHTML/CSS more accessible and hopefully more usable than my clients consciously appreciate or, for the most part, pay for!

Yes, one might rightly say “How long can it take to add a couple of extra declarations for visited links?” But then, are we talking about only doing so for basic links within content, or also for primary and secondary navigation? Clearly, in an ideal world, one would consider all contexts, and test for it, but when one is up against a tight budget and might justifiably percieve oneself as ‘over-delivering’ already, where do you draw the line?!

A flawed defence I know. Let’s just say you’ve added a resolution to my New Year!