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

Eventually, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you’ll leave.
This is as true on a Web site as it is at Sears. You’ll leave when you’re
convinced they haven’t got it or when you’re just too frustrated to keep
looking.
Here’s what the process looks like:

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The unbearable lightness of browsing
Looking for things on a Web site and looking for them in the “real” world
have a lot of similarities. When we’re exploring the Web, in some ways it
even 
feels
like we’re moving around in a physical space. Think of the words
we use to describe the experience—like “cruising,” “browsing,” and
“surfing.” And clicking a link doesn’t “load” or “display” another page—it
“takes you to” a page.
But the Web experience is missing many of the cues we’ve relied on all our
lives to negotiate spaces. Consider these oddities of Web space:

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No sense of scale.
Even after we’ve used a Web site extensively,
unless it’s a very small site we tend to have very little sense of how big
it is (50 pages? 1,000? 17,000?).
2
 For all we know, there could be huge
corners we’ve never explored. Compare this to a magazine, a museum,
or a department store, where you always have at least a rough sense of
the seen/unseen ratio.
2
 
Even the people who manage Web sites often have very little idea how big their sites really are.
The practical result is that it’s very hard to know whether you’ve seen
everything of interest to you in a site, which means it’s hard to know
when to stop looking.
3
3
 
This is one reason why it’s useful for links that we’ve already clicked on to display in a different
color. It gives us some small sense of how much ground we’ve covered.