Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users aregenerally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.
In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.
As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work.
The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so...
Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.
Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a...
The problem is there are no simple right answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, wel...
Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away.
If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to...
It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.
And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some pe...
Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.
There’s almost always a plausible rationale—and a good, if misguided, intention—behind every usability flaw. Another
How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?
Happy talk must die
When fixing problems, always do the least you can.
Or as Jakob Nielsen so aptly put it: The human brain’s capacity doesn’t change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behavior have a very long shelf life. What was difficult f...
The name of the page will match the words I clicked to get there. In
Usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.
I usually call these endless discussions religious debates, because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held pe...
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