Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (20 Mar 2006) Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. The same goes for photos: On countless sites, product images are too small, fuzzy, or murky, or they're simply shot from a bad angle, making the product hard to see. These same sites lavish pixels on big glamour illustrations that our eyetracking studies show attract no fixations. Go figure. Generally, all you need are plainspoken words and clean photos. Nonetheless, these two design elements get almost no coverage in the trade press. Every month, there seems to be a new article in a leading publication about 3D spinning views, even though 3D is nearly useless in most cases. But you never see an article about how to write better headlines or take a clearer product photo. Add this article to Del.icio.us Article URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/design_priorities.html Read 393 more articles from Jakob Nielsen sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: More Alike Than We Think          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy

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