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.

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

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.

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company's profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy.

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.

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