Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (Voices That Matter)

Buy-in is OK in flush times, but when resources are short, you need people who are fanatics—who can’t imagine not spending time and money on creating a top-notch user experience.

If you want people to use something you’ve built, they have to notice it first.

Problems turn out to have deep roots. When you go to fix some usability problems, it quickly becomes clear that they’re actually a symptom of some much larger unresolved conflict—about the site’s purpose or the company’s mission, for instance.

the last-hired/first-fired principle

It’s exactly like what Erik Jonsson describes in his wonderful book about how people get lost, Inner Navigation (Scribner, 2007).

It turns out that the first steps are crucial: people who start off lost tend to stay lost.

Most pages have all kinds of things that the user doesn’t need: too many words, too many irrelevant pictures, too much decoration—too much “noise”—and that’s the reason users aren’t finding what they need.

One of the things people are often tempted to do when there’s a usability problem is to add something. If someone didn’t understand the instructions, add more instructions. If someone couldn’t find what they were looking for in the text, add more text. If someone didn’t notice something they needed to, add more color to it, or make it bolder, or make it larger.
But very often the best way to fix a usability problem is to do just the opposite: take something away. Remove something from the page.

Think bullet points, not paragraphs.

Rather than buy into this, ask, “What’s the smallest change we can make right now that will at least smooth over this problem for most people?”