History's Flows of Buzzling Puzzling
My professor Dr. Jerz has reiterated to my class several times before that there isn't really an immense tome that contains the exact formula on how to do something. Well, maybe there's a math book that does that, but not so for english!
When I was reading the Krug quote above, I couldn't help but think of him telling us that. It seems that even if you make a flop with a website, it only means that you can learn from your mistakes. The net is continuously changing every which way. You can jump on the bandwagon or make your own. Either way, you're going to get to where you need to be.
Today's generation of internet users are practically plugged in 24/7. We've learned wicked multi-tasking skills and can juggle 4 or so open web pages, a word document, be listening to music, and cracking up over a funny video a friend sent us on youtube.com. We can handle it all! However, if we encounter too many websites that actually force us to commit a significant portion of brain power to figuring out what we want, our train can just derail at the most inopportune moment.
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Krug's ideas about distractions and cognitive workload are similar to the "noise" aspect of the communication model (something that has been permanently engraved in my brain after so many communication classes - I can't help myself!) If you have too many "noise" elements, in this case, too many confusing and vague links and parts of a website, your message will never get through to your audience. That is, the users of your website will abandon your website without ever achieving their goal.
I know that "flop of a website" feelings. But it is nice that you can always go back. The only thing that is bad about the web is that once it's out there, it's out there. You can't always go back and erase it. The only criticism I would make about Krug is that he loves the web (obviously) and doesn't always point out the bad about it.