By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)
A great post came across my screen today about short-term memory and web usability by Jakob Nielsen. In his typical fashion he sticks to the basics and expounds upon them by focusing on the average user. See: not you, them.

What got me excited about this post enough to want to share it and write a bit about it was the analogy that Nielsen used to move forward his notion that the human mind is not optimized for the web and the interactions that it demands of users.

As Nielsen points out the human mind is the same one that we were carrying around with us for the last 10,000 years. That is like computing cursor position with an abacus. We’re better than that and often we make interactions overly complex due to this lack of understanding.

What is being built by web designers today are experiences that are disjointed and incongruous with the way that our minds can process information. Links that have multiple functions are a new fav of designers that prove this concept fully. To a designer the type of interaction their link provides may seem contextual if it opens a floating div on click but based on typical interaction a user will expect to be taken to a new page.

Good web design, that design that focuses on usability, is a synthesis of the understanding of the human  mind, interaction principles and efficiency. Typically what we are presented with is laden with extraneous information that competes for out attention or forces and interaction type that not similar to other standard types. Which leads to inefficiency and users that never complete the funnel.

One example that Nielsen gives is that of coupon codes that are copy and paste. First a user must discern which code they need, copy it, find the link to get to the site they need to go to for redemption and then paste it in at the next site. His recommendation is to simply add the code to the link. It simplicity like this that can keep users happy, keep them coming back and motivate them to recommend you to others. They might not even know why they are recommending you, but deep inside it is elemental.

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