Don't Make Me Think

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People won't use your web site if they can't find their way around it. Whether you call it usability, ease-of-use, or just good design, companies staking their fortunes and their futures on their Web sites are starting to recognize that it's a bottom-line issue. In Don't Make Me Think, usability expert Steve Krug distills his years of experience and observation into clear, practical--and often amusing--common sense advice for the people in the trenches (the designers, programmers, writers, editors, and Webmasters), the people who tell them what to do (project managers, business planners, and marketing people), and even the people who sign the checks.

Don't make me think

I recently read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think", an excellent book which describes some User Experience Design best practices. I wanted to share some key takeaways I learned from the book in this article which I think are useful/applicable for anyone that creates web content or interacts with Web Design:

The highest priority in navigation is perhaps that decisions should be painless and intuitive; to some extent click count is secondary to intuitive decision making. As Krug puts it, "well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression".
Along similar lines, due to the nature of web search and modern web use, having well thought out lower level pages is nearly as important as having well designed home pages.
Perhaps most critical in Krug's discussion of usability is his discussion of the "myth of the average user". Rather than designing a page to fit the wants of this fictitious "average user" which more reflects the people in the room than the people using the website, Krug suggests it is more important to design a page to convey contextual content in a way that creates an intuitive experience for any user.
How do we understand whether content layout effectively creates an intuitive experience? Krug says you observe people, even in small 2-3 person groups, actually using the website (small-scale usability testing).
Krug also briefly discusses some accessibility practices, noting the strong moral imperative designers have to incorporate accessible design (aside from legal and financial motivations, which he also mentions). Krug says it is key to "Go for the low-hanging fruit", the issues which are common and as easy to fix as, for example, ensuring the existence of alt-text on images before publication of articles. Taking such steps are so important for improving user experience for accessible technology users and users with disabilities. Accessible design can be difficult, but even just these accessibility-related easy fixes can make a huge impact.

Design, as well as many other fields, is built upon the works and discoveries of the great professionals. Everyone who wants to be an expert in their craft often seeks for the guidance to learn how to do things right. Various books and articles written by gurus are now in a free access on the internet so those striving at knowledge can find the essential instruction without efforts.

“Don’t Make Me Think” describes the key points, examples and insights which are important to know about website usability. The major idea is to create designs with which users wouldn’t need to think too much how the interface works — this way it becomes not only problem-solving but also easy to use.

Here are 20 quotes reflecting some key points from “Don’t Make Me Think”.

If something requires a large investment of time — or looks like it will — it’s less likely to be used.
Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.
A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great. Instruction must die.
Accessibility is 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. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?
Another needless source of question marks over people’s heads is links and buttons that aren’t obviously clickable. As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable — or not.
In the last few years, making things more usable has become almost everybody’s responsibility. Visual designers and developers now often find themselves doing things like interaction design (deciding what happens next when the user clicks, taps, or swipes) and information architecture (figuring out how everything should be organized).
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. Take my word for it: It’s really that simple.
Usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.
The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them — at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed.
The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.
The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious — and easy — can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.
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.
The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need — carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.
Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.
Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.
If there’s one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it’s that almost any design idea — no matter how appallingly bad — can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort.
Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.
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 a bare minimum.
Faced with the prospect of following a convention, there’s a great temptation for designers to try reinventing the wheel instead, largely because they feel (not incorrectly) that they’ve been hired to do something new and different, not the same old thing. Not to mention the fact that praise from peers, awards, and high-profile job offers are rarely based on criteria like “best use of conventions.” Occasionally, time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But usually it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.
If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

Tom Nguyen,
Senior UI/UX Designer, TIGO Solutions.

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Don't Make Me Think