HyperlinkButton control design guidelines for Windows Phone

[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]

The HyperlinkButton control allows you to embed hypertext links in a page and specify a navigation target.

HyperlinkButton control

This topic contains the following sections.

• Appearance and action
• Standard use
• Design Guidelines
• Related Topics

Appearance and action

The HyperlinkButton control looks and operates just like any conventional web hyperlink. It consists of specially formatted text or an image that can be tapped to open a web view somewhere else in your app, or in mobile Internet Explorer.

Standard use

Use a HyperlinkButton control to display web-based content to the user in a web browser. The web-based content can reside locally on the device or be retrieved over the air. A HyperlinkButton control can also be used to reveal additional app-specific content to the user in the same view or in a new view.

Design Guidelines

Use a HyperlinkButton control to let the user view app-specific content when a Button control will take up too much space or look out of place. For instance, use a HyperlinkButton control within a sentence. To trigger app-specific actions, use a Button control instead.

1. Don’t make HyperlinkButton controls longer than a word or two.

2. Don’t place HyperlinkButton controls close to each other. Doing so will make it difficult for the user to select an individual HyperlinkButton control.

3. Don’t display a HyperlinkButton control that’s disabled and can’t be enabled by user action.

4. Use a disabled state for a HyperlinkButton control only if the state is temporary, such as other system processes are occurring or if the state can be changed to enabled by a user action.

Here are examples of proper and improper use of a HyperlinkButton control.

Incorrect	Correct
In this example, a Button control is not the correct control to use to display additional content to the user, because it takes up too much space and looks out of place.	In this example, a HyperlinkButton control is the correct control to use, because it displays as text within the sentence.

See Also

Reference

HyperlinkButton