To be honest, there are three kinds of designs in the chain.

Every element on the Internet is trying to distract you, and a steady stream of links always lures you to the next page or next item. Links, the skeleton of the web world, are the culprits who interrupt them in their lengthy reading. They always imply some valuable direction and force us to make a choice: dot or not? Few people have ever thought about how to improve the user experience of a link, and we accept the challenge and try three things on our own platform.

Links are supposed to be good things. They string together the content, the subject, and the point of view, and all you need is an endless stream of knowledge or a sea of information. The trouble with the reader is that it is sometimes difficult to simply determine whether it is reliable and trustworthy from the information surrounding the link. The problem is even greater for our web site, which wants to provide quality, lengthy readings for our readers.

With links, readers have a better reason to leave. For example, you put a link in the first paragraph, as if to say: In fact, the rest of the text can be put aside, first point here to see it, it contains the information you want. Often, the reader is gone. This chain to that chain, we have long forgotten where to start.

At the same time, reading is a passive experience, while point link is active behavior. A little, and immediately there is a reaction, as if to give a person a feeling of accomplishing something. Point a link quickly and save effort, read the full text but to spend not many times the energy. You'll always see a long list of pages open in everyone's browser, and if everyone reads each one carefully, it's going to take a whole day.

And our website, in the article does not provide any traditional pages in the chain. First of all, to ensure the integrity of the reader to read the article first. Usually the author has his own logic, perhaps around a subject, the investigation ultimately points to a conclusion. If we introduce too many other topics to the reader before the end of the article, it will affect the message delivery of the article itself.

So in de correspondent, editors do not allow authors to add traditional forms of links within the article. But we have a few other alternatives: Information cards, sidebar notes, and key links.

1. Information Card

First, we want to fill in the missing part of the reader's message. If you don't know enough about the people, the company, or the topic that the article is talking about, the article may read like a Greek book. The reason you are most likely to stop reading is that you want to search for some information to understand why the author of the article says something is important. Therefore, in order to ensure that most people can read the article, the author needs to add some basic information, and for those who have enough knowledge to reserve the reader, this information is somewhat superfluous.

The information card is designed to solve the contradiction between the two. This additional content is only displayed when the reader clicks on the arrow, and for those who already know the information, the card can be put away directly, without affecting the reading, as shown in the following figure.

2. Sidebar Notes

The main purpose of most links is to provide a layer of additional information, perhaps a deep layer of view or simply to share a source. However, many links do not prompt readers what they are going to focus on. Most of the time the reader is judging the link content based on the context, but we want to provide clearer instructions.

So I have sidebar notes. It appears next to the relevant paragraph, with a short label describing the link's contents. There will also be a small icon to tell you whether the link is specific to video, audio or text reports. You can also think of it as a design of a similar list, the reader does not have to remember the specific location of a link, all the reference links will appear at a glance in the right-hand column, easy to access.

3. Key Links

Another recurring problem is that when the author mentions the main body of the article for the first time, it will give an official website link. This makes it easy for readers to jump to another site before they read the article. For example, an Introduction music festival article, come up with a link, the reader point, attention is dispersed, hurriedly read after the introduction on the finished.

On our platform, this important link will be placed at the end of the article, so that readers read the full text and then see this key link. At the same time we set a special format for these links, very eye-catching.