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

by Krug Steve

And it’s also still a book about designing anything that people need to interact with, whether it’s a microwave oven, a mobile app, or an ATM.

The basic principles are the same even if the landscape has changed, because usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology. And while technology often changes quickly, people change very slowly.3

The human brain’s capacity doesn’t change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behavior have a very long shelf life. What was difficult for users twenty years ago continues to be difficult today.

In the last few years, making things more usable has become almost everybody’s responsibility.

Knowing some usability principles will help you see the problems yourself—and help keep you from creating them in the first place.

If it’s short, it’s more likely to actually be used.

There’s a good usability principle right there: If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used.

You don’t need to know everything.

You’ll find a lot of different definitions of usability, often breaking it down into attributes like Useful: Does it do something people need done? Learnable: Can people figure out how to use it? Memorable: Do they have to relearn it each time they use it? Effective: Does it get the job done? Efficient: Does it do it with a reasonable amount of time and effort? Desirable: Do people want it? and recently even Delightful: Is using it enjoyable, or even fun?

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.

Chapter 1. Don’t make me think!

it means that as far as is humanly possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.

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

My main point is that the tradeoffs should usually be skewed further in the direction of “Obvious” than we think.

As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

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

And as a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things.

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

If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

While designing something original or groundbreaking

As a result, if Web pages are going to be effective, they have to work most of their magic at a glance.

Chapter 2. How we really use the Web

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.

we tend to think that our own behavior is much more orderly and sensible than it really is.

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

We’re usually on a mission.

We know we don’t need to read everything.

FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.

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.

I’d observed this behavior for years, but its significance wasn’t really clear to me until I read Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

As it turned out, the fire commanders didn’t compare any options. They took the first reasonable plan that came to mind and did a quick mental test for possible problems. If they didn’t find any, they had their plan of action.

FACT OF LIFE #3: We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.

Try it yourself: ask some family members what a Web browser is. You may be surprised.

Chapter 3. Billboard Design 101

there are some important things you can do to make sure they see and understand as much of what they need to know—and of what you want them to know—as possible:

Take advantage of conventions Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas Make it obvious what’s clickable Eliminate distractions Format content to support scanning

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.

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.

Dividing the page into clearly defined areas is important because it allows users to decide quickly which areas of the page to focus on and which areas they can safely ignore.

As Don Norman explains so enjoyably in his recently updated usability classic The Design of Everyday Things, we’re constantly parsing our environment (like the handles on doors) for these clues (to decide whether to pull or push). Read it. You’ll never look at doors the same way again.

When you’re editing your Web pages, it’s probably a good idea to start with the assumption that everything is visual noise (the “presumed guilty until proven innocent” approach) and get rid of anything that’s not making a real contribution.

If you really want to learn about making content scannable (or about anything related to writing for screens in general), run, do not walk, to an Internet-connected device and order Ginny Redish’s book Letting Go of the Words.

Chapter 4. Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

In general, I think it’s safe to say that users don’t mind a lot of clicks as long as each click is painless and they have continued confidence that they’re on the right track—following what’s often called the “scent of information.”1

This term comes from Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card’s “information foraging” research at Xerox PARC in which they drew parallels between people seeking information (“informavores”) and animals following the scent of their prey.

Caroline Jarrett has an entire chapter about it (“Making Questions Easy to Answer”) in her book Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability.

Whether you need to offer some help or not, the point is that we face choices all the time on the Web and making those choices mindless is one of the most important things you can do to make a site easy to use.

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.

Chapter 6. Street signs and Breadcrumbs

I think we talk about Web navigation because “figuring out where you are” is a much more pervasive problem on the Web than in physical spaces.