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And you may find yourself, in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, Well...how did I get here? - Talking Heads

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Nielsen in 20 mins.
113 Guidelines
Don't Make Me Think
20 Heuristics for Site Evaluation
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Don't Make Me Think

Ideas from Steve Krug on Web Usability
Steve Krug. Don't Make Me Think : a common sense approach to web usability Que, 2000.
Companion site : http://www.circle.com/krugbook

Self-Evident

1. A web page should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory. I should be able to "get it" - what it is and how to use it - without expending any effort thinking about it.
2. Should avoid questions as:
   - Hmm. Pretty busy. Where should I start?
   - Hmm. Why did they call this that?
   - Can I click on that?
   - Is that the navigation? Or is that it over there?
   - Why did they put that there?
   - Those two links look like there the same thing. Are they really?
3. Avoid:cute or clever names; marketing-induced names; company-specific names; and unfamiliar technical terms.
4. You can't always make everything self-evident. You then have to settle for self-explanatory - by use of well-chosen names, layout, and small amounts of carefully crafted explanatory text.

Searching

1. The user should not have to think how to search. Avoid the user having to answer: is the author (or whatever) a keyword? What are keywords, and what aren't?
2. Avoid advances and complex searches. Do I have to click on that drop down thing? What happens if I don't make a selection?
3. Avoid distinguished default simple searches by title-author-keyword. Just lump them all together

How We Really Use The Web

1. Most people: glance at each new page, then scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they're looking for.
2. We're thinking - "great literature"; the user is thinking - "billboard at 100kph".
3. They don't figure out how things work. We all just muddle through
4. Example: Many people will type a site's entire URL in the Yahoo search box every time they want to go there, sometimes several times a day. If you ask them about it, it becomes clear that some of them think that Yahoo is the Internet, and that this is the way to use it.

Billboard Design 101

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page: more important more prominent; things that are related logically are also related visually; things are "nested" visually
2. Take advantage of conventions - only innovate when you know you have a better idea (and everyone you show it to says Wow!)
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas.
4. Make it obvious what's clickable.
5. Minimise noise. Don't make areas shout for attention. Sometimes no source is loud enough to be distracting by itself, but there are tiny bits of visual noise that wear us down.

Navigation

1. What is critical is not the number of clicks - but how hard each click is. "3 mindless. unambiguous clicks = 1 click that requires thought"
2. On the web there are missing queues for browsing (compare with Woolies)
   - No sense of scale. How big is the web site; how many pages?
   - No sense of direction. No right or left, no up and down
   - No sense of location.
   
3. Navigation isn't just a feature of a web site. It IS the the Web site, in the same way that the building, the shelves, and the cash registers are Woolies. Without it, there's no there. Web navigation had better be good.
4. Overlooked purposes of navigation:
   - It gives us something to hold on to;
   - It tells us what's here;
   - It tells us how to use the site;
   - It gives us confidence in the people who built it.

Content

1. Happy talk must die! Happy talk welcomes to the sites and tells us how great it is.
2. Instructions must die! No one will read them.