Courtesy Flickr: pveugen

A “usable” website or application is one that lives up to the user’s mental model of how it should work. It should be obvious how controls, navigation, forms and content all work together. It should feel natural. When visiting a site for the first time, we as users establish a mental model for how it should work – what the buttons should do, how the navigation should function and so on. When those components of the site differ from our expectations, we are left with a poor user experience, and the website fails.

Understanding user expectations is not only essential to effective website design, it’s a prerequisite for evolving the interactive experience.