Book Notes: Don't Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug

My notes for the book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug.

How People Use The Web

• They don’t read web pages. They scan them.
• They don’t make optimal choices, they satisfy/suffice.
• They don’t figure out how things work. They muddle through them.

Maximize Understanding

1. Take advantage of conventions, but realize that clarity trumps consistency.
2. Create effective visual hierarchies:
   • Which things are most important
   • Which things are similar
   • Which things are part of others
3. Break up pages into defined areas.
4. Make it obvious as to what’s clickable.
   • Utilize shape, location, and formatting to achieve this.
5. Minimize distractions. Consider three kinds of noise:
   • Shouting
   • Disorganization
   • Clutter
6. Format text to support scanning
   • Use headings effectively
   • Break text up into short paragraphs
   • Use bullet points
   • Highlight important words

Let Users Make Mindless Choices

• Number of clicks is less important than the difficulty of each click
• Each click should give confidence that the user is on the right track

Omit Needless Words

• Eliminate happy talk
• Minimize instructions

Web Navigation

Navigation is not just a feature of a site; it is the site.

Purposes of navigation:

1. It tells us what’s here—reveals content
2. It tells us how to use the site—should be the only instructions necessary
3. It gives us confidence in the people who made it—the best way to make a good impression

Persistent components of every page:

1. Logo
2. Section Navigation
3. Utilities (Account, Login, Logout, etc.)
4. Return to home (often logo)
5. Search (which should be simple, and always be labeled using the word “Search”)
6. Page names (with the correct placement and prominence)
7. Current section indicator
8. Breadcrumbs (if there are many levels to the site)

Apply the “Trunk Test” to assess usability of any page. Go to a random page and answer the following:

1. What site is this?
2. What page am I on?
3. What are the major sections?
4. What are the options at this level?
5. Where am I relative to the hierarchy?
6. How can I search?

The Home Page

• The home page should convey the big picture. It should include:
  • A tagline
  • The welcome blurb
  • A way to “learn more”
• The home page is one of the most important things to conduct usability testing on.
• Don’t kill the golden goose:
  • Placing something on the home page makes it more visible.
  • Placing too much on the home page makes the whole page ineffective.

Disagreements About Usability

• Everyone on a web development team has different opinions.
• Developers, designers, marketers, etc. all value different things.
• There is a clash between:
  • Hype culture (management, marketing, sales), and
  • Craft culture (designers and developers)

The myth of the average user—there is no average user.

All web users are unique and all web use is basically idiosyncratic.

• The antidote to usability conflicts:
  • Don’t ask “Do most people like X?”
  • Instead, ask “Does this X with this Y, in this context, on this page create a good experience for people that use this site?”

Usability Testing

• If you want a great site, you have to test.
• Testing one user is better than testing none.
• Testing one user early is better than testing 50 near the end.
• Do-it-yourself testing is cheap and cost effective.
• You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.
• Focus on fixing the most serious problems first.

Mobile Usability

• It’s all about tradeoffs (as is all design).
• But, managing real estate challenges shouldn’t be done at the cost of usability.
• Rely heavily on ‘affordances’—visual cues in an object’s design that suggest how we can use it.

Something is usable if a person of average ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing (i.e. it’s learnable) to accomplish something (effective) without it being more trouble than it’s worth (efficient).

Usability as Common Courtesy

• Users have a ‘reservoir of goodwill’ that will change over the course of their experience on your site.
  • It’s idiosyncratic
  • It’s situational
  • You can refill it
  • Sometimes a single mistake can empty it
• Diminishing the reservoir may result in a user abandoning the site, criticism, lower Net Promoter Score, etc.

Things that diminish goodwill

• Hiding info the user wants (e.g. support contacts, pricing)
• Punishing the user for not doing things your way (e.g. input formatting)
• Asking for unnecessary information
• Feigning concern (e.g. “Your call is important to us”)
• Bloat content impeding navigation (e.g. excessive stock images)
• An amateurish website

Things that increase goodwill

• Know what things people want to be able to do—make doing those things easy
• Tell people what they want to know (e.g. shipping cost)
• Save steps wherever possible
• Make information accurate and thorough
• Know what questions users will have, and answer them (FAQs, documentation)
• Creative comforts (printer-friendly web pages)
• Recover from errors gracefully
• When in doubt, apologize

Accessibility

Accessibility is the right thing to do, but it can be difficult to make an accessible site.

Four things to do:

1. Fix the usability issues that confuse everyone.
2. Test with users using adaptive technologies.
3. Read accessibility books (e.g. “Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance”)
4. Fix the low hanging fruit.

Making Usability Happen Where You Are

• Get your boss/team to watch a usability test
• Pilot a test on your own
• Test the competition

Final Tips

• Don’t use small, low-contrast type
• Don’t put labels inside form fields
• Preserve the distinction between visited and unvisited links
• Don’t float headings between paragraphs—there should be more space above them than below them

---