On the Internet, it's survival of the easiest.... Give users a good experience and they're apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But ... it's easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around.

On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?

Compared to 1999...we cannot quite declare victory, but we can declare progress.

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.

The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web.

Windows '98 is so similar to Windows '95 because Apple hasn't invented anything worth copying since 1995.

Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.