Provide Shortcuts Through Familiar Areas

This principle is a corollary to the previous one: Provide users with strategies for controlling their "success". Psychologically, success is associated with how far one proceeds from some starting point. The better, or better-prepared, reader will measure this not only by how far, but also by how fast they proceed. Spending a great deal of time filling in or clicking through familiar material quickly drains reader enthusiasm and creates an undesirable adversarial relationship with the text. While it remains important to stimulate the recall of prerequisites in all readers, the detail of the review should be reader controlled. In hypertext, this control is easily provided by jumps ahead for better readers, or jumps aside for more detailed reviews.