The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design.
It postulates that animals, people, and even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort."
He theorised that the distribution of word use was due to tendency to communicate efficiently with least effort and this theory is known as Zipf's Law.
[3] Within the context of information seeking, the principle of least effort was studied by Herbert Poole who wrote Theories of the Middle Range in 1985.
The principle must be considered when designing individual Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) as well as other library tools.
The principle of least effort was further explored in a study of library behavior of graduate students by Zao Liu and Zheng Ye (Lan) Lang published in 2004.