affordance - Is a plain unadorned hyperlink sufficient for sharing a link?

This is from a post on the SO Blog:

So how do you share questions? I mentioned in an earlier post that we support a shorter URL form specifically for sharing:

https://diy.stackexchange.com/q/970/123

You can access the shorter URL form using the twitter and facebook sharing icons on public beta sites, or by right-clicking and copying the link conveniently provided under each question, on any site.

To encourage this sort of sharing, there’s a certain tiny percent chance a little reminder will appear on recent hot questions, or when upvoting questions that have reached a certain vote threshold:

Don’t worry — these reminders are very infrequent by design, and limited to public betas only. They also go away forever if you hold one of the badges.

Well, recently (before I had read the post) I've been trying to share a question. I didn't plan to do it on Facebook or Twitter, so I didn't press those buttons, since I didn't know whether I'll get a chance to just copy the link before it posts it on my profile.

I did remember seeing that little dialog, and now I spent way too much time trying to recreate it, but it didn't help. When I pressed on the "link" link, nothing happened. At no point did it occur to me to right-click and copy the actual link itself.

So I think that there's a number of problems here:

1. All the other links on that list (edit, close, delete, flag) provide immediate visual changes on the screen, while the "link" link merely refreshes the screen, and if you're super-observant, you might notice the slight change in the address bar. I'm not sure whether to classify this as a problem with visual affordance, consistency, predictability, meeting user expectations or all of the above.


2. When the dialog does appear, it's visually connected to the "link" link, thus stating very clearly that you need to press that link to expose the dialog. Yet, "there's a certain tiny percent chance" that it will actually work - and that only in case the dialog had first appeared by itself, and you closed it. In all the other cases the user feels they're definitely doing something wrong or blame it on a bug.


3. Many other places on the web provide short links or permalinks on demand, and the vast majority of them do it in plain sight, so what happens here is quite non-standard.

So, is this bad UI? Should we try to change it?

I wasn't sure whether to post this in Meta or here, but since this is after all a proper UI issue, I put it here.

Answer

I think Vitaly Mijritsky sums up some downsides quite clearly. The way it is currently set up it is not clear what the link link does and clicking on it doesn't provide any feedback at all. But even more: the popup doesn't indicate it is not standard behavior. It may be different it said something like "copy this link to earn [etc]" without putting the link in text.

By showing the actual link you create the expectation that the link will be shown again. And by creating that expectation even people that know rightclick->copy may very well be stuck in a different train of thought, because once they have seen the dialog they go looking for that, rather than for a solution to the underlying problem (copying a link).

That's how users handle UIs - only minimal thought processing goes into using UIs and they rely on easy hints and customs. So somewhere is the vague memory of a dialogue shown, and they expect it to be shown and when it isn't they think 'it is not working' and that gets more attention than 'oh wait, why did I want the dialogue again'?

Of course people will eventually find out how to work it. And they will copy links (although I think it is far more likely that people will either copy the url in the address bar or the link from the title, because those are the places normally used).

But all the arguments of 'you have been on the internet', 'other sites do it too' etc - those are just not good arguments for unclear UI behavior. (And I'm sure is not clear to everybody - how did it do in the hallway tests?)

Mostly, I just don't see any reason at all why you shouldn't pop up the message that is already there. It meets expectations created by the first showing of that box, it gives visual feedback to anyone who ever clicks that link (things that do nothing are confusing and bad UI in any case), and it doesn't interfere with people who prefer to use rightclick (or whatever ways of copying a link location).