bookworm

Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug

Review

The web has evolved significantly since this book was published; but for the most part the principles outlined will remain timeless. The principles are mostly common sense, but the author states them concisely and clearly. The practical recommendations for usability testing are spot. Start early. Doing more rounds is going to be more impactful than interviewing more participants.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

  • Usability is ensuring that something works well.
  • Pay attention to usability, and you’ll reduce the frustration of your users and increase their satisfaction. You’ll be more likely to see them again.
  • “Don’t make me think” should be the overriding principle of web design.
  • A web page should be self-evident, self-explanatory, and obvious.
  • Users should be able to ‘get it’ instantly. That means understanding what it is and how to use it without expending any effort thinking about it.
  • You should eliminate question marks. Each question mark makes us think, adds to our cognitive workload, and distracts our attention from the task at hand.
    • Where should I start?
    • Can I click on that?
    • Why did they call it that?
    • Why did they put that there?
    • Where am I?
    • Is that the navigation?
    • What are the most important things on this page?
  • There’s a continuum from ‘obvious to everybody’ to ‘truly obscure’. It’s almost always a good idea to skew toward obvious.
  • People don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. If you don’t care enough to make things obvious and easy, you’ll erode confidence and sap enthusiasm.
  • People don’t look at web pages for long, designs need to be effective at a glance.
    • Each page should be self-evident. Users should know what it is and how to use it.
    • Can’t make a page self-evident? At least make it self-explanatory.
  • People don’t read websites the way we think. They glance at a page, scan some text, and click on the first link that resembles what they’re looking for.
  • We often choose the first reasonable option, not the best option. We click the first link that might work.
  • There’s not a big penalty for guessing wrong.
  • We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.
  • If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.
  • Help your users see and understand as much of your site as possible.
  1. Create a clear visual hierarchy. All visual clues should clearly and accurately portray relationships between things. The more important something is, the more prominent it should be. Things that are logically related should also be visually related. Things should be nested to show what they’re part of.
  2. Take advantage of conventions. Conventions are effective ideas that have been copied over time. Users move from site to site, and conventions help users figure out what to do quickly. Resist the temptation to reinvent the wheel. Innovate when you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.
  3. Break pages into clearly defined areas. Creating sections helps users decide what to focus on and what to ignore.
  4. Make it obvious what’s clickable. Users are looking for what to click next, so make it clear what’s clickable and what isn’t.
  5. Minimize noise. Visual noise is the enemy, and there are two kinds:
    • Busyness – It’s overwhelming when everything is clamoring for your attention.
    • Background noise – Lots of small background noise that adds up to visual clutter. Assume everything is visual noise until proven otherwise.
  • How many clicks it takes to reach something seems like a sensible measure. BUT the number of clicks doesn’t matter, it’s the amount of thought required and the level of uncertainty about the choice.
  • Users don’t mind clicks if they’re painless and they have confidence that they’re on the right path. Jared Spool refers to this as ‘the scent of information’.
  • Making choices mindless is one of the primary ways to enhance usability.
  • Omit needless words.
  • “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.”
  • Be ruthless about removing words. Removing words reduces noise and makes useful content more prominent.
  • Aim for clear, simple, and consistent navigation.
  • You’re usually looking for something when you view a page. You decide whether to search or browse. If browsing, you make your way through a hierarchy until you eventually find what you’re looking for.
  • Browsing is like moving around physical space. However, physical space has a clear sense of scale, direction, and location. Navigation serves two purposes: knowing where you are and knowing how to get from one place to the next. Using navigation conventions helps users locate them quickly and with minimum effort. Standardize the appearance of navigation and differentiate it from website content.
  • Every page should have either a search box or a link to a search page.
  • Give users a sense of place. Think “you are here.”
  • Navigation is well-designed if, when dropped onto any page, you can answer the following questions:
    • What site you’re on (site name)
    • What page you’re on (page name)
    • What the major sections of the site are (sections)
    • What your options are (local navigation)
    • Where you are relative to everything else (“You are here” indicators)
    • Where you can search
  • The home page has a lot to do:
    • Site identity and mission
    • Site hierarchy
    • Search
    • Teasers (the best content and promotions)
    • Timely content (updated frequently)
    • Potential advertising / deal space
    • Shortcuts (e.g. frequently viewed)
    • Registration
  • The home page also has to meet these objectives:
    • Show me what I’m looking for
    • Show me where to start
    • Establish credibility and trust
  • Everyone from your company will want a piece of the home page
    • Too many people have opinions
    • There’s no one-size-fits-all
  • Don’t lose the big picture. It should be clear: Where to start a search, where to start browsing, and where to go to sample the best stuff.
  • Home pages seem to attract shortsighted behavior. Promoting things on the home page works too well → so there’s a tendency to try and promote everything. There’s a tragedy of the commons. The thing that’s added benefits hugely, but the effectiveness of the homepage suffers.
    • Site identity and mission
    • Site hierarchy
    • Search
    • Teases (the best content and promotions)
    • Timely content (updated frequently)
    • Potential advertising / deal space
    • Shortcuts (e.g frequently viewed)
    • Registration
  • Most arguments about usability are a waste of time. Teams end up in endless discussions (almost religious debates), expressing strongly held beliefs that can’t be proven. They rarely result in anyone changing their point of view; they create tension and erode respect among team members.
    • Instead, build a version of the thing and observe people using it. There’s no substitute for testing. Debates drain time and energy. Testing defuses arguments and helps make decisions. Testing teaches us that users’ reactions are varied and unpredictable.
  • Usability testing in a nutshell: To learn if your product is easy to use, you watch some people try to use it and note where they run into trouble. Then fix it and test again.
  • Don’t do usability testing 2 weeks before launch; that’s too little, too late. You must still have time to use what you learn. Test early and often in the web development process. You can start usability testing on comparable sites or competitor sites.
  • If you make testing big and scary, you won’t get the most out of it. Keep testing simple, so you do enough of it. Testing one user early in the process is better than testing 50 at the end.
  • Testing always works.
  • Testing one person is 100% better than testing none.
  • The importance of recruiting representative users is overrated. Instead, recruit loosely and grade on a curve. Try to find users who reflect your audience, but don’t get hung up on it.
    • Experts are rarely insulted by being presented with a product that’s clear enough for beginners to use. You need to address novices as well as experts.
    • When recruiting, offer an incentive, keep the invitation simple, avoid discussing the site beforehand, and don’t be embarrassed to ask people you know.
  • Use testing to inform your judgment, not to prove or disprove something.
  • Testing is iterative: make something, test it, fix it, test again. Doing many rounds of testing and fixing makes this process easier and lowers the stakes.
  • It’s better to do more rounds of usability testing with fewer people. Test with 3-4 users per round. They’ll encounter most of the problems. Then make some fixes and test again. It also reduces the size of the task and the number of notes, so you can complete it all in the same day.
  • You can find problems faster than you can fix them. So stay focused on the most serious issues.
  • Triage: decide which problems are important and need to be fixed. Ignore problems where the user recovers quickly and is not fazed by the issue. Take feature requests from users with a grain of salt. Focus on low-hanging fruit (big, inexpensive wins).
  • Problem solve: figure out how to fix them. Resist the impulse to add things (the best answer is often to remove something). Think carefully about what else is impacted by the changes you make.
  • Doing the right thing is an important part of usability.
  • Each problem we encounter on a website lowers our goodwill reservoir. The reservoir is limited, treat people badly and you’ll exhaust it.
  • We should make our websites accessible because it is the right thing to do. Accessibility is one of the few times you’ll be able to dramatically improve someone’s life by doing your job a little better.
  • Things you can do right now: Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone. Read up on usability testing. Use CSS so you can serialize your text for screen readers and so users can resize text. Go for low-hanging fruit.
  • Do as much as you want to make your site look good, but only if it’s not at the expense of making it work well.

Bojan

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