About website usability

I can’t remember if it was in a book I read or a quote I ran into on the blogosphere, but I must admit it has proven to be a great philosophy for guiding our website design.  

“If your users need to read a manual on how to use your site, its too complicated!”

Our design team is really striving to make WorkGrabber as straightforward and easy to use as possible.  Unfortunately, sometimes we have a bunch of computer programmers deciding on whats “easy”.  The way I see it, every link, every button, every navigation should make it’s goal extremely obvious.  Tonight I wanted to throw out an intial “sneak peek” at what our (overly?) simplistic menu design will look like for an individual job:

If you already have a pre-pre-alpha invite (yes, we’re really calling it that), then you recognize this.  There’s alot more on the page and we’ve gotten some feedback on what its missing and what was a little too much (thanks Alf!).  As long as its satisfying your needs and you don’t have to think about “how do I…”, then we’re happy!  If we need to explain how to work our site, then we’ve failed!

UPDATE:  Thanks for all the interest and sorry for not posting this on the original post.  If you’re a contractor and want to get one of our “pre-pre-alpha invites”, just send an email to “ppalpha@workgrabber.com” with your info.  We’d love to hear from you!