> He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.
I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.
In creating documents with hyperlinks for training students, I have found blue underlined still catches the most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting, different colors of underlining.
I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.