Don't Make Me Think

A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

By Steve Krug

This book describes how to create good website user experiences. It was originally created in the early 2000s and revisited a few years ago for modern websites. However a lot of the original principle still apply today.

As the title of the book would suggest, Krug points out that the first law of usability is “don’t make me think”. Definition of usability:

A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it's worth.

We don't read pages, we scan them. Make your content easily scannable.

You have a “reservoir of goodwill” with users. If things don’t function as expected, there are bugs, or you make your users have higher cognitive load than necessary, you will start to drain this reservoir. It’s hard to refill it and can be lost in many ways.

He also goes into the importance of usability testing and how to go about it.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

THINGS YOU NEED TO GET RIGHT

MAKING SURE YOU GOT THEM RIGHT

LARGER CONCERNS AND OUTSIDE INFLUENCES

Why is usability important and how do users use our sites?

If something is usable—whether it’s a Web site, a remote control, or a revolving door—it means that A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it’s worth.

When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.

Don’t deviate from conventions by default

If you’re not going to use an existing Web convention, you need to be sure that what you’re replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory that there’s no learning curve—so it’s as good as the convention, or (b) adds so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve. My recommendation: Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.

CLARITY TRUMPS CONSISTENCY If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.

Make choices mindless

For example, as recently as a few years ago when I was trying to buy a product or service to use in my home office (like a printer, for instance), most of the manufacturers’ sites asked me to make a top-level choice like this: Which one was me? I had to think about it, and even when I made my choice I wasn’t very confident it was the right one. In fact, what I had to look forward to when the target page finally loaded was even more thinking to figure out whether I was in the right place.

Cut out needless words in communication

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum.

On good navigation

It gives us confidence in the people who built it. Every moment we’re in a Web site, we’re keeping a mental running tally: “Do these guys know what they’re doing?” It’s one of the main factors we use in deciding whether to bail out and deciding whether to ever come back. Clear, well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression.

Done right, persistent navigation should say—preferably in a calm, comforting voice: “The navigation is over here. Some parts will change a little depending on where you are, but it will always be here, and it will always work the same way.”

On usability testing

You can often get more revealing results if you allow the participants to choose some of the details of the task. It’s much better, for instance, to say “Find a book you want to buy, or a book you bought recently” than “Find a cookbook for under $14.” It increases their emotional investment and allows them to use more of their personal knowledge of the content.

I want to make it clear right away that we’re testing the site, not you. You can’t do anything wrong here.

Create one design that works on all devices / screen sizes

Developers learned long ago that trying to create separate versions of anything—keeping two sets of books, so to speak—is a surefire path to madness. It doubles the effort (at least) and guarantees that either things won’t be updated as frequently or the versions will be out of sync.

Don’t hide your affordances

Affordances are visual clues in an object’s design that suggest how we can use it.

Affordances are the meat and potatoes of a visual user interface. For instance, the three-dimensional style of some buttons makes it clear they’re meant to be clicked. The same as with the scent of information for links, the clearer the visual cues, the more unambiguous the signal.

The reservoir of goodwill

I’ve always found it useful to imagine that every time we enter a Web site, we start out with a reservoir of goodwill. Each problem we encounter on the site lowers the level of that reservoir

Things that diminish goodwill

Punishing me for not doing things your way.

I should never have to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in my Social Security number, spaces in my credit card number, or parentheses in my phone number. Many sites perversely insist on no spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much easier to type the number correctly. Don’t make me jump through hoops just because you don’t want to write a little bit of code.

Your site looks amateurish.

You can lose goodwill if your site looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like no effort has gone into making it presentable.

Things that increase goodwill

Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy. It’s usually not hard to figure out what people want to do on a given Web site. I find that even people who disagree about everything else about their organization’s site almost always give me the same answer when I ask them, “What are the three main things your users want to do?”

Why make things accessible?

Unfortunately, there’s also a lot that’s unlikely to convince 22-year-old developers and designers that they should be “doing accessibility.”

It’s the right thing to do. And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives.

Screen-reader users scan with their ears. Most blind users are just as impatient as most sighted users. They want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. They do not listen to every word on the page—just as sighted users do not read every word. They “scan with their ears,” listening to just enough to decide whether to listen further. Many set the voice to speak at an amazingly rapid rate.

This book was a pretty easy read. It was well formatted and broken up, practicing what he preaches as far as communication on websites.

It validated and formalized a lot of things I either knew explicitly or know intuitively. This is one of the reasons I got into the field I’m in - it’s painful to use some product that makes me think unnecessarily for some reason. I can’t stand why they wouldn’t want to fix that. This also makes me think of the two “forgotten password” bug-fixes I sent out for Dropbox. Fixing that does not improve revenue or fix any broken funnels, but leaving it up erodes trust and makes the site look amateurish. It drains the reservoir of goodwill.

Really need to answer the key things a person wants to know on a given page. "What is this? What do they have here? What can I do here? Why should I be here and not somewhere else?" From what I’ve seen when people design things they put so much more information into their designs and think of them in static vacuums. It’s rare we think of the before and after journey for a design - we just look at the individual page the user is on not how they interacted with a different part of the site before or after.

https://medium.com/@bonny.bakshi/dont-make-me-think-revisited-by-steve-krug-book-review-53dee1ee6d7f#:~:text=This%20makes%20the%20book%20fun,It%20all%20'depends'.

https://dev.to/desi/book-review-don-t-make-me-think-329k