To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.
Clear content, simple navigation and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
On average, when you ask someone to perform a task on a site, they cannot do it. It’s not their fault; it’s the designer’s fault.
In the attention economy, anyone trying to connect with an audience must treat the user’s time as the ultimate resource.
A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.
A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time.
Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.
At most project meetings, everyone has a seat at the table except the poor victims who will have to operate the technology.
Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.
The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouseclick away.
Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web.
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
The best Web sites are better than Reality.
Windows ’98 is so similar to Windows ’95 because Apple hasn’t invented anything worth copying since 1995.
What we learned is money doesn’t grow on trees.
People have to want to change before there’s any chance of helping them do so.
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
Diversity is power on the Web. Big sites may be bigger, but smaller sites will keep scoring higher for specialized topics, both in terms of their connections with users and in terms of each visit’s commercial value.