Popularity is the product of two factors: (a) how compelling material you offer, and (b) how easy it is to access it. Host free pirated movies and users will flock to the site, even if it's difficult to use.

Clear content, simple navigation and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

What we learned is money doesn't grow on trees.

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?

If your users have many questions, it's a failure of your primary site design. It becomes not so much customer support, as much as customer complaints.

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