Usability

Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2000.

"But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen" (22). Ah, the return of the E-Book debate. Book 2.0. What do we do with this, when online communities are only textual (for now?) and text is "noisy"? Krug says "We don't read pages. We scan them," and this is true for the "information" based websites Krug is designing. But what about those websites that don't just disseminate, but create? Is this where the "drabble" and "flashfic" came from? Is it the amount of text as a whole, or the amount of text per section (as in posts to blogs)?

"Happy talk must die" (46) wherein "happy talk" are the introductory welcoming messages that we hate to write, and hate to read. But these are also conventions which he *likes*. Welcome tags are "basically just a way to be sociable" (46)--well, isn't that what we want, for social websites?

On Bookmarking: When we want to return to something on a Web site, instead of relying on a physical sense of where it is we have to remember where it is in teh conceptual hierarchy an retrace our steps. This is one reason why bookmarks--stored personal shortcuts--are so important and why the Back button accounts for somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all Web clicks.

We should change the Welcome! to a Start Here! tag.

The myth of the Average User:
"The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything" (136).