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

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

Step 1: Choose a page anywhere in the site at random, and print it.

Unmoderated remote testing. Services like UserTesting.com provide people who will record themselves doing a usability test.

For each round of testing, you need to come up with tasks: the things the participants will try to do. The tasks you test in a given round will depend partly on what you have available to test.

Caroline Jarrett has an entire chapter about it (“Making Questions Easy to Answer”) in her book Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability.

Most of this book has been about building clarity into Web sites: making sure that users can understand what it is they’re looking at—and how to use it—without undue effort. Is it clear to people? Do they “get it”? But there’s another important component to usability: doing the right thing—being considerate of the user. Besides “Is my site clear?”

As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:

only time we’re even vaguely aware that we’re doing it is when we can’t do it—when the visual cues (or absence of them) force us to think.