Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

The “bible” of web usability in its second incarnation. A couple of ideas or take-aways from the book:

• Make the site natural to the user and his actions
• Build billboards not newspapers
• Make stuff visible and easy to determine what’s its function to the user
• “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of what’s left”
• Home page is really an important starting point in the design, although everybody wants to have its saying about it.
• make clear what’s the mission of the site, easily done through displaying a tagline (5-8 words)
• make sure the home page conveys just the main objective of the site and not an in-depth review of what the site does
• have a clear separation of the main tagline, categories, description, search and others
• usability: testing earlier is better and cheaper than doing it at the very end of the project
• to get a new perspective on the site you’re building, you must test it
• testing some parts by even 1 user is better than no testing at all
• focus groups help establishing the target user group of the site before the design phase starts
• try to involve different people from different teams in order to get more traction and involvement during the (usability) testing
• ask the tester to do some specific tasks besides
• After the walkthroughs review/go over the notes as soon as possible