Why it matters: So jam-packed with “obvious” wisdom that I could barely put down my notes app. Many notes for such a short book shows its value for anyone who is designing things with user interaction involved.
#Things to consider
- Follow convention. Designers are often reluctant to take advantages of convention. There’s a great temptation to reinvent the wheel. Whenever a designer decides to create scrollbars from scratch—they oversee the thousands of hours of fine tuning that went into the evolution of standard operating system scrollbars.
- Make it obvious what’s clickable. We’re constantly scanning our environment for clues about how things behave and how can expect to interact with them. A large part of what people are doing on the web is looking for the next thing to click.
- We aren’t reading web pages, we scan them. People are usually on a mission. Web use involves trying to get something done. So we act like sharks, only looking for what we’re after. We don’t have time to read more than necessary. Scanning is how we find the relevant bits. What we see when we look at a page depends on what we have in mind.
- Clarity trumps consistency. If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.
- Resist the impulse to add things. When it’s obvious in testing that users aren’t getting something, the team’s first reaction is usually to add something, like an explanation or instructions. More often than not a better solution would be to take something away which is obscuring the meaning.