If you want readers, keep it simple
While I was in the middle of building the telstrashares.com site, I took a visit to a site called Alertbox. And there, at 11 pm, Jakob Neilsen fed me a bitter-tasting supper of Web reality. Neilsen is an engineer, not a diplomat. He spends his days at Sun Microsystems' usability lab (he's a "Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer"). Then he writes books on user interface issues - at least seven to date. And to the benefit of Web designers everywhere, Dr Neilsen also writes articles about how people use Web sites - as opposed to how their designers would like to think they use sites. These he puts into his Alertbox site at www.useit.com, whose prosaic name shows his utilitarian bent. Neilsen titles his latest Alertbox instalment How Users Read on the Web. His first paragraph reads, in full: "They don't." This crisp little Neilsen sentence was not what I wanted to read in the middle of hoisting thousands of words into telstrashares.com.