Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

by Krug Steve

Provide me with creature comforts like printer-friendly pages. Some people love being able to print stories that span multiple pages with a single click, and CSS makes it relatively easy to create printer-friendly pages with little additional effort. Drop the ads (the possibility of a banner ad having any impact other than being annoying is even greater when it’s just taking up space on paper), but don’t drop the illustrations, photos, and figures. Make it easy to recover from errors. If you actually do enough user testing, you’ll be able to spare me from many errors before they happen. But where the potential for errors is unavoidable, always provide a graceful, obvious way for me to recover. When in doubt, apologize. Sometimes you can’t help it: You just don’t have the ability or resources to do what the user wants (for instance, your university’s library system requires separate passwords for each of your catalog databases, so you can’t give users the single login they’d like). If you can’t do what they want, at least let them know that you know you’re inconveniencing them.