Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

In the attention economy, anyone trying to connect with an audience must treat the user's time as the ultimate resource.

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

Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones.

People have to want to change before there's any chance of helping them do so.

The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouseclick away.