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

The fifth question
Once I know what I’m looking at, there’s still one more important question
that the Home page has to answer for me:
When I enter a new site, after a quick look around the Home page I should
be able to say with confidence:
Here’s where to start if I want to search.
Here’s where to start if I want to browse.

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 Here’s where to start if I want to sample their best stuff.
On sites that are built around a step-by-step process (applying for a
mortgage, for instance), the entry point for the process should leap out at me.
And on sites where I have to register if I’m a new user or sign in if I’m a
returning user, the places where I register or sign in should be prominent.
Unfortunately, the need to promote 
everything
(or at least everything that
supports this week’s business model) sometimes obscures these entry points.
It can be hard to find them when the page is full of promos yelling “Start
here!” and “No, click 
me
first!”
The best way to keep this from happening is to make the entry points look
like entry points (i.e., make the search box look like a search box and the list
of sections look like a list of sections). It also helps to label them clearly,
with labels like “Search,” “Browse by Category,” “Sign in,” and “Start here”
(for a step-by-step process).
Why Golden Geese make such tempting targets
There’s something about the Home page that seems to inspire shortsighted
behavior. When I sit in on meetings about Home page design, I often find the
phrase “killing the golden goose” running through my head.
3
3
 
I always thought that the phrase came from the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. In fact, Jack’s
Giant did have a goose that laid golden eggs, but nobody tried to kill it. The senseless slaughter
occurs in one of Aesop’s fables, and there’s not much to it, plot-wise: Man finds goose, man gets
greedy, man kills goose, man gets no more eggs. Moral: “Greed often overreaches itself.”
The worst of these behaviors, of course, is the tendency to try to promote
everything.
The problem with promoting things on the Home page is that it works too
well. Anything with a prominent Home page link is virtually guaranteed to
get more traffic—usually a great deal more—leading all of the site’s
stakeholders to think, “Why don’t I have one?”
The problem is, the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home
page aren’t shared equally. The section that’s being promoted gets a huge
gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it
gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.
It’s a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.
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 The premise is
simple:

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The concept, originated by nineteenth-century amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd,
was popularized in a classic essay on overpopulation by biologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy
of the Commons,”
Science, 
December 1968).
Any shared resource (a “commons”) will inevitably be destroyed by overuse.
Take a town pasture, for example. For each animal a herdsman adds to the
common pasture, he receives all proceeds from the sale of the animal—a
positive benefit of +1. But the negative impact of adding an animal—its
contribution to overgrazing—is shared by all, so the impact on the individual
herdsman is less than –1.
The only sensible course for each herdsman is to add another animal to the
herd. And another, and another—preferably before someone else does. And
since each rational herdsman will reach the same conclusion, the commons
is doomed.
Preserving the Home page from promotional overload requires constant
vigilance, since it usually happens gradually, with the slow, inexorable
addition of just...one...more...thing.
All the stakeholders need to be educated about the danger of overgrazing the
Home page and offered other methods of driving traffic, like cross-
promoting from other popular pages or taking turns using the same space on
the Home page.

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