Quotes from Steve Krug

I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt.

The problem is, the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren't shared equally. The section that's being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.

The reality is that in the business world almost everyone is just a very small cog in a huge collection of cogs.2 2 Sorry. Try not to take it personally. Do good work. Enjoy your home life. Be happy.

every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand.

Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you've made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue ("Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%"). There's an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew.

You're not interested in what it takes to uncover most of the problems; you only care about what it takes to uncover as many problems as you can fix.

One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it's essentially about constraints (things you have to do and things you can't do) and tradeoffs (the less-than-ideal choices you make to live within the constraints).

Having something pinned down can have a focusing effect, where a blank canvas with its unlimited options—while it sounds liberating—can have a paralyzing effect.

A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing [i.e., it's learnable] to accomplish something [effective] without it being more trouble than it's worth [efficient].

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.1

What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

There's a good usability principle right there: If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it's less likely to be used.

Clear, well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression.

Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end.

I think the ideal number of participants for each round of do-it-yourself testing is three.

Another needless source of question marks over people's heads is links and buttons that aren't obviously clickable. As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

It's good to do your testing with participants who are like the people who will use your site, but the truth is that recruiting people who are from your target audience isn't quite as important as it may seem. For many sites, you can do a lot of your testing with almost anybody. And if you're just starting to do testing, your site probably has a number of usability flaws that will cause real problems for almost anyone you recruit.

A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it's worth. Take my word for it: It's really that simple.

Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to explaining what makes us great.

You actually can be too rich or too thin

I usually call these endless discussions "religious debates," because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can't be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What

Sincerity: that's the hard part. If you can fake that, the rest is easy.