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

The First Casualty of War
Given everything the Home page has to accomplish, if a site is at all
complex even the best Home page design can’t do it all. Designing a Home
page inevitably involves compromise. And as the compromises are worked
out and the pressure mounts to squeeze in just one more thing, some things
inevitably get lost in the shuffle.
The one thing you can’t afford to lose in the shuffle—and the thing that most
often gets lost—is 
conveying the big picture
. Whenever someone hands me
a Home page design to look at, there’s one thing I can almost always count
on: They haven’t made it clear enough 
what the site is
.
As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four
questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:
I need to be able to answer these questions at a glance, correctly and
unambiguously, with very little effort.
If it’s not clear to me what I’m looking at in the first few seconds,
interpreting everything else on the page is harder, and the chances are greater
that I’ll misinterpret something and get frustrated.
But if I do “get it,” I’m much more likely to correctly interpret everything I
see on the page, which greatly improves my chances of having a satisfying,
successful experience.
This is what I call the Big Bang Theory of Web Design. Like 
the
Big Bang
Theory, it’s based on the idea that the first few seconds you spend on a new
Web site or Web page are critical.
We know now from a very elegant experiment (search for “Attention Web
Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression!”)

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that a lot happens as soon as you open a page. For instance, you take a quick
look around (in milliseconds) and form a number of general impressions:
Does it look good? Is there a lot of content or a little? Are there clear regions
of the page? Which ones attract you?
The most interesting thing about the experiment was that they showed that
these initial impressions tended to be very similar to the impressions people
had after they actually had a chance to spend time on the page. In other
words, we make snap judgments, but they tend to be a pretty reliable
predictor of our more reasoned assessments.
This is not to say that our initial understanding of things is always right. In
fact, one of the things I’ve seen most often in usability tests is that people
form ideas about what things are and how they work which are just wrong.
Then they use these first bits of “knowledge” to help interpret everything
they see.
If their first assumptions are wrong (“This is a site for ____”), they begin to
try to force-fit that explanation on to everything they encounter. And if it’s
wrong, they’ll end up creating more misinterpretations. If people are lost
when they start out, they usually just keep getting...loster.
This is why it’s so crucial that you get them off on the right foot, making
sure that they’re clear on the big picture.
Don’t get me wrong: Everything else 
is
important. You 
do
need to impress
me, entice me, direct me, and expose me to your deals. But these things
won’t slip through the cracks; there will always be plenty of people—inside
and outside the development team—seeing to it that they get done. All too
often, though, no one has a vested interest in getting the main point across.