Design Principles – Design for scanning, not reading! Take advantage of conventions. Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas. Make it obvious what’s clickable. Eliminate distractions. Format content to support scanning . Keep paragraphs short. Use bulleted lists. Highlight key terms.
In all the time I’ve spent watching people use the Web, the thing that has struck me most is the difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them. When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things
Another major source of needless words is instructions. The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them —at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed.