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

The one thing you can’t afford to lose in the shuffle—and the thing that most often gets lost—is conveying the big picture. Whenever someone hands me a Home page design to look at, there’s one thing I can almost always count on: They haven’t made it clear enough what the site is.

the facilitator’s main job is to encourage them to think out loud as much as possible. The combination of watching what the participants do and hearing what they’re thinking while they do it is what enables the observers to see the site through someone else’s eyes and understand why some things that are obvious to them are confusing or frustrating

Keep paragraphs short.

Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end.

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

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.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.

Create effective visual hierarchies Another important way to make pages easy to grasp in a hurry is to make sure that the appearance of the things on the page—all of the visual cues—accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page: which things are most important, which things are similar, and which things are part of other thing

(Banner blindness—the