INTRODUCTION

 

It wasn’t long ago that surfing the Internet was a standalone task that fell into our daily schedule like reading the newspaper or putting out the trash. For an hour or two, we disconnected the phone line and listened to the screech of the modem link to the world wide web.

Load speed was slow, and there was a drawn-out thought process that preceded each click. Waiting twenty seconds or longer for a page to render placed a heavy time penalty on selecting the wrong link. But as wireless broadband Internet infiltrated more homes, schools, and offices, online behavior changed and our browsing habits started to become more brazen.

Oops! Clicked on the wrong link? No problem. Jab the “Back” button and you’re right back where you started. A few seconds might be lost but as Steve Krug explains in the book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, “there’s not much of a penalty for guessing wrong.”...