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

by Krug Steve

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.

Fortunately, much of what I do is just common sense, and anyone with some interest can learn to do it. Like a lot of common sense, though, it’s not necessarily obvious until after someone’s pointed it out to you.3 3 ...which is one reason why my consulting business is called Advanced Common Sense. “It’s not rocket surgery” is my corporate motto. I spend a lot of my time telling people things they already know, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking “I knew that” a lot in the pages ahead.

If it’s short, it’s more likely to actually be used.4 I’m writing for the people who are in the trenches—the designers, the developers, the site producers, the project managers, the marketing people, and the people who sign the checks—and for the one-man-bands who are doing it all themselves. 4 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. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful for you to learn.5 5 I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he can’t afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones: “What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Design is a complicated process and the real answer to most of the questions people ask me is “It depends.”

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

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.

Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them!

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

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

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

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.

There’s nothing new about visual hierarchies. Every newspaper page, for instance, uses prominence, grouping, and nesting to give us useful information about the contents of the page before we read a word.

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.

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

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

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 moral? It’s vital to have sample pages that show the navigation for all the potential levels of the site before you start arguing about the color scheme.

Page names are the street signs of the Web. Just as with street signs, when things are going well I may not notice page names at all. But as soon as I start to sense that I may not be headed in the right direction, I need to be able to spot the page name effortlessly so I can get my bearings.

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

The purpose of this kind of testing isn’t to prove anything. Proving things requires quantitative testing, with a large sample size, a clearly defined and rigorously followed test protocol, and lots of data gathering and analysis. Do-it-yourself tests are a qualitative method whose purpose is to improve what you’re building by identifying and fixing usability problems. The process isn’t rigorous at all: You give them tasks to do, you observe, and you learn. The result is actionable insights, not proof.

It’s good to do your testing with participants who are like the people who will use your site, but the truth is that recruiting people who are from your target audience isn’t quite as important as it may seem. For many sites, you can do a lot of your testing with almost anybody. And if you’re just starting to do testing, your site probably has a number of usability flaws that will cause real problems for almost anyone you recruit.

Whenever possible, it’s good to let the user have some say in choosing the task.

The least-known fact about usability testing is that it’s incredibly easy to do. Yes, some people will be better at it than others, but I’ve rarely seen a usability test fail to produce useful results, no matter how poorly it was conducted.

One of Apple’s great inventions was the ability to scroll (swiping up and down) and zoom in and out (pinching and...unpinching) very quickly. (It was the very quickly part—the responsiveness of the hardware—that finally made it useful.)

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).

I’ve always found it useful to imagine that every time we enter a Web site, we start out with a reservoir of goodwill. Each problem we encounter on the site lowers the level of that reservoir.