Diversity is power on the Web. Big sites may be bigger, but smaller sites will keep scoring higher for specialized topics, both in terms of their connections with users and in terms of each visit's commercial value.

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.

At most project meetings, everyone has a seat at the table except the poor victims who will have to operate the technology.

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.

Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience.

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.