week 2 reading

Chapter 3 talks about designing webpages for "scanning", because humans are scanners. Instead of reading deeply all of the time, if a person is looking for something they do a series of quick scans to find key words or symbols which they believe might lead them in the right direction. Since humans are designed to work in this fashion, it makes sense to take advantage of this. Hierarchy, headlines, bullets, splitting info into areas, making choices obvious and simple. mix all this up with the basics of design and the site becomes more effective.

Chapter 4 is explained well in the title... why users like mindless choices. This chapter restates the idea of making the experience as simple as possible. "Doesn't matter what I click, as long as each click is a mindless unambiguous choice..."

Krug's second law of usability

Chapter 5 talks about slimming down content. This process makes important information more prominent. It also makes the page shorter, reduces visual noise that may hide important information, and can also make instructions easier to deal with. The end result is you can see more of the information at a glance instead of having to navigate to find it. when people are searching for something, they like to find it as quickly as they can.

Here are some related links:

these two links go together and talk about the "F" pattern of human visual scanning in relation to the web

first:http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/04/08/doesnt-graphic-designlayout-affect-scanning-patterns

second: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

This next link is a connection to the world. It has some good ideas for clean, simple websites. I looked up "keep it simple stupid websites" and this is what I found. I chose to look for this info in this fashion because both chapter 4 and 5 talk about making it all easier, and keeping it simple....

http://inspiredology.com/keep-it-simple-stupid-48-super-simple-clean-websites/