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

by Krug Steve

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.

FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them.

most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option,

It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring. It’s just not important to us.3 3 Web developers often have a particularly hard time understanding—or even believing—that people might feel this way, since they themselves are usually keenly interested in how things work.

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

A good visual hierarchy saves us work by preprocessing the page for us, organizing and prioritizing its contents in a way that we can grasp almost instantly.

Use plenty of headings.

If you’re using more than one level of heading, make sure there’s an obvious, impossible-to-miss visual distinction between them. You can do this by making each higher level larger or by leaving more space above it.

Keep paragraphs short. Long paragraphs confront the reader with what Caroline Jarrett and Ginny Redish call a “wall of words.” They’re daunting, they make it harder for readers to keep their place, and they’re harder to scan than a series of shorter paragraphs. You may have been taught that each paragraph has to have a topic sentence, detail sentences, and a conclusion, but reading online is different. Even single-sentence paragraphs are fine.

Use bulleted lists. Think of it this way: Almost anything that can be a bulleted list probably should be. Just look at your paragraphs for any series of items separated by commas or semicolons and you’ll find likely candidates. And for optimal readability, there should be a small amount of additional space between the items in the list.

Highlight key terms. Much page scanning consists of looking for key words and phrases. Formatting the most important ones in bold where they first appear in the text makes them easier to find. (If they’re already text links, you obviously don’t have to.) Don’t highlight too many things, though, or the technique will lose its effectiveness.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG’S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY

over time I’ve come to think that what really counts is not the number of clicks it takes me to get to what I want (although there are limits), but rather how hard each click is—the amount of thought required and the amount of uncertainty about whether I’m making the right choice.

When you can’t avoid giving me a difficult choice, you need to go out of your way to give me as much guidance as I need—but no more. This guidance works best when it’s Brief: The smallest amount of information that will help me Timely: Placed so I encounter it exactly when I need it Unavoidable: Formatted in a way that ensures that I’ll notice it Examples are tips adjacent to form fields, “What’s this?” links, and even tool tips.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. —KRUG’S THIRD LAW OF USABILITY

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.

Imagine that you’ve been blindfolded and locked in the trunk of a car, then driven around for a while and dumped on a page somewhere deep in the bowels of a Web site. If the page is well designed, when your vision clears you should be able to answer these questions without hesitation: What site is this? (Site ID) What page am I on? (Page name) What are the major sections of this site? (Sections) What are my options at this level? (Local navigation) Where am I in the scheme of things? (“You are here” indicators) How can I search? Why the Goodfellas motif? Because it’s so easy to forget that the Web experience is often more like being abducted than following a garden path. When you’re designing pages, it’s tempting to think that people will reach them by starting at the Home page and following the nice, neat paths you’ve laid out. But the reality is that we’re often dropped down in the middle of a site with no idea where we are because we’ve followed a link from a search engine, a social networking site, or email from a friend, and we’ve never seen this site’s navigation scheme before. And the blindfold? You want your vision to be slightly blurry, because the true test isn’t whether you can figure it out given enough time and close scrutiny. The standard needs to be that these elements pop off the page so clearly that it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking closely or not. You want to be relying solely on the overall appearance of things, not the details. Here’s how you per...

the Home page is the waterfront property of the Web: It’s the most desirable real estate, and there’s a very limited supply. Everybody who has a stake in the site wants a promo or a link to their section on the Home page, and the turf battles for Home page visibility can be fierce. Sometimes when I look at a Home page, I feel like the boy in The Sixth Sense: “I see stakeholders.” “University Website” | xkcd.com The result of design by stakeholders.

Too many cooks. Because the Home page is so important, it’s the one page that everybody (even the CEO) has an opinion about. One size fits all. Unlike lower-level pages, the Home page has to appeal to everyone who visits the site, no matter how diverse their interests.

As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:

Good taglines convey differentiation and a clear benefit. Jakob Nielsen has suggested that a really good tagline is one that no one else in the world could use except you,

Why didn’t we do this sooner? —WHAT EVERYONE SAYS AT SOME POINT DURING THE FIRST USABILITY TEST OF THEIR WEB SITE

I used to say that the best way to think about testing is that it’s like travel: a broadening experience. It reminds you how different—and the same—people are and gives you a fresh perspective on things.1

When I teach workshops, I make a point of always doing a live usability test at the beginning so that people can see that it’s very easy to do and it always produces valuable insights.

Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. Most people assume that testing needs to be a big deal. But if you make it into a big deal, you won’t do it early enough or often enough to get the most out of it. A simple test early—while you still have time to use what you learn from it—is almost always more valuable than an elaborate test later.

Part of the conventional wisdom about Web development is that it’s very easy to go in and make changes. The truth is, it’s often not that easy to make changes—especially major changes—to a site once it’s in use. Some percentage of users will resist almost any kind of change, and even apparently simple changes often turn out to have far-reaching effects. Any mistakes you can correct early in the process will save you trouble down the line.

In fact, I’m in favor of always using some participants who aren’t from your target audience, for three reasons: It’s usually not a good idea to design a site so that only your target audience can use it. Domain knowledge is a tricky thing, and if you design a site for money managers using terminology that you think all money managers will understand, what you’ll discover is that a small but not insignificant number of them won’t know what you’re talking about. And in most cases, you need to be supporting novices as well as experts anyway. We’re all beginners under the skin. Scratch an expert and you’ll often find someone who’s muddling through—just at a higher level. Experts are rarely insulted by something that is clear enough for beginners. Everybody appreciates clarity. (True clarity, that is, and not just something that’s been “dumbed down.”) If “almost anybody” can use it, your experts will be able to use it, too.

It’s all about tradeoffs One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it’s essentially about constraints (things you have to do and things you can’t do) and tradeoffs (the less-than-ideal choices you make to live within the constraints).

rather than being the negative force that they often feel like, constraints actually make design easier and foster innovation.

Sincerity: that’s the hard part. If you can fake that, the rest is easy. —OLD JOKE ABOUT A HOLLYWOOD AGENT

Frequently Asked Questions lists are enormously valuable, especially if They really are FAQs, not marketing pitches masquerading as FAQs (also known as QWWPWAs: Questions We Wish People Would Ask). You keep them up to date. Customer Service and Technical Support can easily give you a list of this week’s five most frequently asked questions. I would always put this list at the top of any site’s Support page.

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago. —JOHN FRAZEE, IN THE JOURNAL OF IRREPRODUCIBLE RESULTS

Don’t use small, low-contrast type. You can use large, low-contrast type, or small (well, smallish) high-contrast type. But never use small, low-contrast type. (And try to stay away from the other two, too.) Unless you’re designing your own design portfolio site, and you really, truly don’t care whether anybody can read the text or not.

Don’t float headings between paragraphs. Headings should be closer to the text that follows them than the text that precedes them.

there are even sites where you do want the interface to make people think, to puzzle or challenge them. Just be sure you know which rules you’re bending and that you at least think you have a good reason for bending them.

If you’d like your life to be good, marry well.