Here's Why Hyperlinks Are Usually Blue

Hyperlinks have been predominantly blue since the World Wide Web was introduced in the 1980s, and they are unlikely to change anytime soon. Why? The reason for blue hyperlinks is still true to this day — it's the easiest color to read. In 1985, after many experiments, Professor Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab essentially created the blue link for selectable text. He said: "Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user's capacity to read and retain the content of the text... Blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds, and didn't interfere with retention." 

But let's go back — before the World Wide Web, the internet was almost all text. It was full of extensive menus of files that users had to navigate through, which was pretty tiresome. Shneiderman and graduate student Dan Ostroff presented a new idea at a museum exhibit: a menu of numbered choices that allows users to go to the exact information they want to see instead of scrolling through a massive menu in order. While it's something we take for granted now, this innovative concept streamlined internet usage like never before. Initially called an "embedded menu," this was the introduction of a hyperlink. But how did Shneiderman land on blue?

Blue hyperlinks have a long history — as long as the internet itself. In the early '80s, Professor Ben Shneiderman came up with the concept of having anchor text act as an embedded link to other locations on the internet. In 1985, Shneiderman and a group of students at the University of Maryland ran a bunch of tests to see which color worked the best for embedded links. A year later, Shneiderman published a research paper on blue text in the Communications of the ACM magazine. Called "Embedded menus: selecting items in context," this paper highlighted how embedded menus were preferred mainly over traditional menus and command syntax — and blue was the color of choice for these embedded menus due to its visibility against white and black backgrounds. When this research concluded, blue links were built into an early system called HyperTIES, becoming the earliest instance of blue hyperlinks.  

Shneiderman attended the Hypertext Conference in North Carolina in 1987. Here, he held a panel called "User interface design for HyperTIES electronic encyclopedia," which explained how his team conducted 20 studies focused on hypertext design, which were light blue at the time. Throughout the 90s, other industry experts continued to discuss the importance of hypertext design and various early computer programs — including ones found on Windows — used blue for its links. After all the studies, conferences, and collected data, blue hyperlinks were here to stay — and have become something we often give no second thought to despite decades of research going into their existence.