Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Happy talk must die
We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s
supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is or to tell us
what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.
If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test:
If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny
voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah....”
A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing
that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it
conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as
opposed to explaining what makes us great.
Although happy talk is sometimes found on Home pages—usually in
paragraphs that start with the words “Welcome to...”—its favored habitat is
the front pages of the sections of a site (“section fronts”). Since these pages
are often just a list of links to the pages in the section with no real content of
their own, there’s a temptation to fill them with happy talk. Unfortunately,
the effect is as if a book publisher felt obligated to add a paragraph to the
table of contents page saying, “This book contains many interesting chapters
about _____, _____, and _____. We hope you enjoy them.”
Happy talk is like small talk—content-free, basically just a way to be
sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get
right to the point. You can—and should—eliminate as much happy talk as
possible.
Instructions must die
Another major source of needless words is instructions. The main thing you
need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least
not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed. And
even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users finding the
information they need are pretty low.
Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making
everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions

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are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum.
For example, here are the instructions I found at the beginning of a site
survey:
I think some aggressive pruning makes them much more useful: