Sublime

In the early days of web design, most people used to say, “People don’t read on the Web—so keep your word count down.” In fact, that is not true. The fact is, although most people usually don’t read, just skim, everyone does read some of the time.

A lot of e-commerce sites are removing navigation during checkout to minimize distraction. If you test that, make sure you track the average order value for each challenger as well as conversion rate.

To understand the potential effect of the page fold, the first thing you need to do is learn what the most common page fold height is.

1. Design Principles – Design for scanning, not reading! Take advantage of conventions. Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas. Make it obvious what’s clickable. Eliminate distractions. Format content to support scanning . Keep paragraphs short. Use bulleted lists. Highlight key terms.

Take advantage of conventions Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas Make it obvious what’s clickable Eliminate distractions Format content to support scanning

Caroline Jarrett has an entire chapter about it (“Making Questions Easy to Answer”) in her book Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability.

Search.

Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.