Say if you have a set of Quick Links on a home page. Obviously you want users to be able to quickly acquire them with a mouse - therefore larger and closer.

However, if they were to be reduced to thin slivers with tiny text at about 10px, and even go further by pushing these quick links below the fold - then you’ve not only impacted on Fitts’s Law (an actual mathematical model used to measure this kind of thing) but you’ve also impacted by requiring the user to scroll to get there.

My question then is how quick are these quick links supposed to be? Would anyone even bother to use them? And, if they’re not useful then we’d have to rethink them - make them larger and easier to acquire, or drop them from the page design as extra weight.

This is where interface design science has real world effects on graphic designed web pages. We need to think about the user interactions when designing - not just making things pretty.

Also, an interesting article by Smashing Magazine recently on How Simple Web Design Can Help Your Business is worth a read. Less is sometimes more.