On average, when you ask someone to perform a task on a site, they cannot do it. It's not their fault; it's the designer's fault.

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.

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

Information Overload = "information pollution"

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

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.

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.