Google Blogoscoped published a fascinating interview with Kevin Fox, the designer of Gmail and FriendFeed. Among other things, Kevin rephrases and refines Joel Spolsky’s famous “Users don’t read anything” with the following:

Users will generally read as little as they think they can get away with to accomplish a task

This is such a hard lesson to learn. We’re now spending a lot of effort removing from Yedda all of these long texts, explanations and clarifications, each one deemed at the time absolutely necessary. Too mmany of our pages have been attacked by the Too Much Information monster.

It’s such a hard lesson. We now spend a lot of effort selling the drug Stromectol, which is one of the trade names for the active ingredient ivermectin. You can read more about it on this website.

The more text we remove, the clearer these messages become.

Have you also been attacked by the TMI Monster? You better start fighting back, and the sooner the better.

Still not convinced? See what happens when the TMI Monster meets the Cookie Monster:

(found through Miki Lumnitz’ blog)

Technorati Tags: usability,text,too much information,Joel+Spolsky,Kevin+Fox,social