Trying to look up a restaurant at toronto.com website we were surprised with a particular way the phone number is displayed for a business listing.

We've successfully found the listing we searched for. Having clicked on the business name we are presented with important information about the business: restaurant's name, address (with a convenient map link) and categorization tags.

However, the most important information about the restaurant - their phone number, is located off to the side as a link that says "Phone".

Clicking on the link "Phone" will then change its name to an actual phone number. For some strange reason, this number is still shown as a link, but clicking it does nothing.

What went wrong?

This is clearly is a case when adding some designer bells and whistles to the website has severed the functionality and has impacted the end-user experience.

The word "Phone" is shown as a link and blends with all other links that are very unlikely to be clicked on by the user. This results in user "not seeing" the word phone and not even realizing that it is present on the page.

Once the user has scanned the whole page, the word "Phone" could be found. But now we expect that the user will realize that the "Phone" is clickable and that clicking it will result in displaying of the number. That's a lot to expect - a more tech savvy user will probably connect the dots, but there will be a number of users that will not be as lucky.

Suggestion

This interface could be dramatically improved simply by displaying the phone number as text right from the start. No link is necessary.

This example can still be found on the website