Steve Krug

It's not rocket surgery.

If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used.

The first law of usability: Don’t make me think.

People don’t read pages. They scan them.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them, the more you'll realize that everything you think you know about what they want is wrong.

When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What they actually do most of the time is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.

Usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.

Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away.

Your goal should be for each page or screen to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it.

If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.