Don't Make Me Think! has been a very helpful source throughout this class. It's an easy read because it is so conversational and cuts out any wordiness. After skimming through it for the best section, I decided that Chapter 4: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? would be the most applicable.
This chapter's main point is that users want something easy to navigate. They don't want to have to think about what they're doing. As the author calls it, users want mindless choices. A web presence like this can be created by repetition. Nearly every website has a search bar at the top, additional links at the side or bottom, and ways to navigate the page across the top. Keeping this general template creates an "I've been here before" feeling for the user, thus eliminating uncertainty. In addition to easy navigation, everything you create must be easy to understand and clear to your user. No one wants to search around a page and click a thousand links because they don't understand where each one will take them. I have definitely been that user! I'm applying for study abroad and the website of the school I want to attend is very confusing. I've clicked my way between tens of hundreds of pages, not sure where each goes exactly, and never able to find my way back to the original page, or the right page once I found it. Users want mindless choices. My group and I can use this information to make a user-friendly web presence. Our audience is college students, and no student wants to spend hours trying to get more information on traveling. By making the websites simple and easy to navigate, students will find what they are looking for faster, and therefore staying interested longer.
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