Confessions of a Chief Home Officer

Users appreciate quality and credibility. If they see high-quality content, they are usually willing to tolerate advertisements and a poor design. This is why websites with mediocre designs but high quality content gain a lot of traffic over the years. Content is more important than the design that supports it.

Users don’t read; they scan. When they analyze a web page, users search for some fixed points or anchors that can guide them through the content on the rest of the page.

Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification. A very simple principle: if a website doesn’t meet users expectations, then the designer has failed to perform his or her job properly, and the company will lose money. The higher the cognitive load needed by users to process the website and the less intuitive the navigation, the more likely users will leave the website and search of alternatives.

Users don’t always make the best choices. They don’t look for the quickest way to find the information they want. Nor do they scan web pages in a linear fashion going sequentially from one section to another. Instead, users choose whatever “satisfices” (satisfy + suffice). They choose the first reasonable option that presents itself. As soon as they find a link that might possible lead to their goal, users will very likely click on it immediately. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient.

Users follow their intuition. In most cases, users muddle through on their own rather than read the information a designer has provided. According to Steve Krug, the basic reason for this is that users don’t care. “If we find something that works, we stick to it. It doesn’t matter to us if we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. If we are audience is going to act you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.”

Users want to have control. Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on consistently presented data throughout the website. For example, they don’t want new windows popping-out unexpectedly, and they want to be able to use the “Back” button to return to a website they had just visited.

From the Smashing Book, page 123.

Tagged: design