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

by Krug Steve

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...