Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Voices That Matter)

Use plenty of headings. Well-written, thoughtful headings interspersed in the text act as an informal outline or table of contents for a page.

One of the things that becomes obvious as soon as you do any usability testing—whether you’re testing Web sites, software, or household appliances—is the extent to which people use things all the time without understanding how they work, or with completely wrong-headed ideas about how they work.

If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.

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.1 As soon as we find a link that seems like it might lead to what we’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that we’ll click it.

One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.

RECRUIT LOOSELY AND GRADE ON A CURVE In other words, try to find users who reflect your audience, but don’t get hung up about it.

It’s good to do your testing with participants who are like the people who will use your site, but the truth is that recruiting people who are from your target audience isn’t quite as important as it may seem. For many sites, you can do a lot of your testing with almost anybody. And if you’re just starting to do testing, your site probably has a nu

And three users are very likely to encounter many of the most significant problems related to the tasks that you’re testing.

You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.