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useit.com

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Nielsen, whose weekly musings on the Web can be found at www.useit.com, is a usability engineer and Web-design consultant given to strongly held ideas and sweeping statements, like "fast response times are the most important criterion for Web pages." His certitude might be insufferable if he weren't right so much of the time.

The basic principles of good design, according to Nielsen, are very simple: If your pages don't load quickly, your customers won't wait. If customers can't find what they want, they won't buy it. If your pages are confusing or hard to read, customers will look elsewhere