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

by Krug Steve

I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But I’d like to clarify a few things.

If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used.

“What’s the most important thing I should do if I want to make sure my site or app is easy to use?” The answer is simple. It’s not “Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away” or “Speak the user’s language” or “Be consistent.” It’s... “Don’t make me think!”

When you’re creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks.

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.

every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand.

checklists. The most important thing you can do is to understand the basic principle of eliminating question marks.

Here’s the rule: If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn’t make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don’t matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiasm—and time.

What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are almost always large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.

What we see when we look at a page depends on what we have in mind, and it’s usually just a fraction of what’s there.

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.1 As soon as we find a link that seems like it might lead to what we’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that we’ll click it.

If you’re not going to use an existing Web convention, you need to be sure that what you’re replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory that there’s no learning curve—so it’s as good as the convention, or (b) adds so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve.

My recommendation: Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.

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.

Since a large part of what people are doing on the Web is looking for the next thing to click, it’s important to make it easy to tell what’s clickable.

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.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

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.

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

Getting rid of all those words that no one is going to read has several beneficial effects: It reduces the noise level of the page. It makes the useful content more prominent. It makes the pages shorter, allowing users to see more of each page at a glance without scrolling.

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 explaining what makes us great.

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.

Clear, well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression.

“The navigation is over here. Some parts will change a little depending on where you are, but it will always be here, and it will always work the same way.”

ALL WEB USERS ARE UNIQUE AND ALL WEB USE IS BASICALLY IDIOSYNCRATIC

The main difference is that in usability tests, you watch people actually use things, instead of just listening to them talk about them.

Usability testing has been around for a long time, and the basic idea is pretty simple: If you want to know whether something is easy enough to use, watch some people while they try to use it and note where they run into problems.

One approach was Mobile First. Instead of designing a full-featured (and perhaps bloated) version of your Web site first and then paring it down to create the mobile version, you design the mobile version first based on the features and content that are most important to your users. Then you add on more features and content to create the desktop/full version.

A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing [i.e., it’s learnable] to accomplish something [effective] without it being more trouble than it’s worth [efficient].

Most of this book has been about building clarity into Web sites: making sure that users can understand what it is they’re looking at—and how to use it—without undue effort. Is it clear to people? Do they “get it”? But there’s another important component to usability: doing the right thing—being considerate of the user. Besides “Is my site clear?” you also need to be asking, “Does my site behave like a mensch?”

Save me steps wherever you can. For instance, instead of giving me the shipping company’s tracking number for my purchase, put a link in my email receipt that opens their site and submits my tracking number when I click it. (As usual, Amazon was the first site to do this for me.)

Usability (making sure things are designed in a way that enables people to use them successfully) and Information Architecture (making sure the content is organized in a way that allows people to find what they need).

The reality is that in the business world almost everyone is just a very small cog in a huge collection of cogs.2 2 Sorry. Try not to take it personally. Do good work. Enjoy your home life. Be happy.