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

by Krug Steve

Even before you begin designing your site, for instance, it’s a good idea to do a test of competitive sites. They may be actual competitors, or they may just be sites that have the same style, organization, or features that you plan on using. Bring in three participants and watch them try to do some typical tasks on one or two competitive sites and you’ll learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work without having to design or build anything.

You can often get more revealing results if you allow the participants to choose some of the details of the task. It’s much better, for instance, to say “Find a book you want to buy, or a book you bought recently” than “Find a cookbook for under $14.”

If they ask for help, just say something like “What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

Of course, it turned out this was wrong. People are just as likely to be using their mobile devices while sitting on the couch at home, and they want (and expect) to be able to do everything. Or at least, everybody wants to do some things, and if you add them all up it amounts to everything.

Developers learned long ago that trying to create separate versions of anything—keeping two sets of books, so to speak—is a surefire path to madness. It doubles the effort (at least) and guarantees that either things won’t be updated as frequently or the versions will be out of sync.

My personal standard for a delightful app tends to be “does something you would have been burned at the stake for a few hundred years ago.”

So far, no one has succeeded.

And yet almost every site I go to still fails my three-second accessibility test—increasing the size of the type.

It’s the right thing to do. And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. Personally, I don’t think anyone should need more than this one example: Blind people with access to a computer can now read almost any newspaper or magazine on their own. Imagine that.

Ginny has made it available for personal use at redish.net/images/stories/PDF/InteractionsPaperAuthorsVer.pdf. Yes, it’s ten years old, but it’s still relevant.

Talk about things like pain points, touch points, KPIs, and CSI, or whatever management buzzwords are trending in your organization.

And learning to speak “business” can be challenging, too. That’s what MBA degrees are for.

In my experience, executives often become fascinated and stay longer than they’d planned, because it’s the first time they’ve seen anyone try to use the company’s site and it’s often not nearly as pretty a picture as they’d imagined.

Do the first one on your own time. When you do your first test, don’t ask for permission; just keep it incredibly simple and informal, and find volunteers for participants so it doesn’t cost anything.

You want your enthusiasm for usability to be infectious, but it just doesn’t work to go around with the attitude that you’re bringing the truth—about usability, or anything else—to the unwashed masses. Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.

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.