This units reading assignment covered chapters 3-5 of Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
The next chapter, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” goes further into how users do not want to think about how to explore your site. They don’t have time to–it should be intuitive. Users don’t care how many times they need to click, as long as they don’t have to think hard on what they should click first. Choices on the user’s end should be mindless–making the site easy to use.
Piggy-backing on these ideas, chapter 5 “Omit needless words”, further expresses the need to simplicity. A very key phrase used is “Get rid of half of the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left”. No one is going to read a long paragraph on a website, no matter how well written it is, they will likely skim at most. Why not make the information easy for them to attain, rather than hope they got your message through their skimming. Text should not be there just to take up space, each word placed on the site should have a clear purpose. Websites should avoid filler.
Painting Emily 