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

by Krug Steve

We’ve come to expect things like autosuggest and autocorrect, and we’re annoyed when we can’t pay a parking ticket or renew a driver’s license online.

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.

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.

“Don’t make me think!” For as long I can remember, I’ve been telling people that this is my first law of usability.

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

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.

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

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.

(Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.)

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.

Glancing around, they should be able to point at the different areas of the page and say, “Things I can do on this site!” “Links to today’s top stories!” “Products this company sells!” “Things they’re eager to sell me!” “Navigation to get to the rest of the site!”

The New York Times makes the same kind of choice seem much easier by not confronting you with all the details at once. Making an initial selection (to log in or to see your options for subscribing) takes you to another screen where you see only the relevant questions or information for that selection.

It’s brief (“LOOK RIGHT” and an arrow pointing right), timely (you see it at the instant you need to be reminded), and unavoidable (you almost always glance down when you’re stepping off a curb).

Why? Because the Site ID represents the whole site, which means it’s the highest thing in the logical hierarchy of the site. This site Sections of this site Subsections Sub-subsections, etc. This page Areas of this page Items on this page

As a rule, the persistent navigation can accommodate only four or five Utilities—

In particular, avoid Fancy wording. They’ll be looking for the word “Search,” so use the word Search, not Find, Quick Find, Quick Search, or Keyword Search. (If you use “Search” as the label for the box, use the word “Go” as the button name.)

Street signs are big. When you’re stopped at an intersection, you can read the sign for the next cross street. They’re in the right place—hanging over the street you’re driving on, so all you have to do is glance up.

Every page needs a name. Just as every corner should have a street sign, every page should have a name.

Put them at the top. Breadcrumbs seem to work best if they’re at the top of the page. I think this is probably because it literally marginalizes them—making them seem like an accessory, like page numbers in a book or magazine. Use > between levels. Trial and error seems to have shown that the best separator between levels is the “greater than” character (>), probably because it visually suggests forward motion down through the levels. Boldface the last item. The last item in the list should be the name of the current page, and making it bold gives it the prominence it deserves. And because it’s the page that you’re on, naturally it’s not a link.

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?

Registration. If the site uses registration, the Home page needs links or text boxes for new users to register and old users to sign in and a way to let me know that I’m signed in (“Welcome back, Steve Krug”).

I usually call these endless discussions “religious debates,” because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven—

It’s always seemed to me that these people probably have the jobs they do because of who they are. Designers, for instance, probably became designers because they enjoy pleasant visual experiences. They get visceral pleasure from looking at pages full of elegant type and subtle visual cues. There are endorphins involved.

3 I once saw a particularly puzzling feature on the Home page of a prominent—and otherwise sensibly designed—site. When I asked about it, I was told, “Oh, that. It came to our CEO in a dream, so we had to add it.” True story.

The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

The point is, it’s not productive to ask questions like “Do most people like pull-down menus?” The right kind of question to ask is “Does this pull-down, with these items and this wording in this context on this page create a good experience for most people who are likely to use this site?”

important. People often test to decide which color drapes are best, only to learn that they forgot to put windows in the room.

I think every Web development team should spend one morning a month doing usability testing. In a morning, you can test three users, then debrief over lunch. That’s it. When you leave the debriefing, the team will have decided what you’re going to fix before the next round of testing, and you’ll be done with testing for the month.

The purpose of this kind of testing isn’t to prove anything. Proving things requires quantitative testing,

You don’t need to find all of the problems. In fact, you’ll never find all of the problems in anything you test. And it wouldn’t help if you did, because of this fact: You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.

And three users are very likely to encounter many of the most significant problems related to the tasks that you’re testing.

There are many places and ways to recruit test participants, like user groups, trade shows, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, customer forums, a pop-up on your site, or even asking friends and neighbors. If you’re going to do your own recruiting, I recommend that you download the Nielsen Norman Group’s free 147-page report How to Recruit Participants for Usability Studies.4 You don’t have to read it all, but it’s an excellent source of advice.

Always provide a link to the “full” Web site.

What is this “delight” stuff, anyway? Delight is a bit hard to pin down; it’s more one of those “I’ll know it when I feel it” kind of things.

fun, surprising, impressive, captivating, clever, and even magical.

There’s one more attribute that’s important: memorability. Once you’ve figured out how to use an app, will you remember how to use it the next time you try or will you have to start over again from scratch?

Either (a) the airline had no procedure for updating their Home page for special circumstances, (b) for some legal or business reason they didn’t want to admit that there might be a strike, (c) it hadn’t occurred to them that people might be interested, or (d) they just couldn’t be bothered. No matter what the real reason was, they did an outstanding job of depleting my goodwill towards both the airline and their Web site. Their brand—which they spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year polishing—had definitely lost some of its luster for me.

Hiding information that I want. The most common things to hide are customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, and prices.

Punishing me for not doing things your way. I should never have to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in my Social Security number, spaces in my credit card number, or parentheses in my phone number. Many sites perversely insist on no spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much easier to type the number correctly. Don’t make me jump through hoops just because you don’t want to write a little bit of code.

You may lose points if your shipping rates are higher than I’d like, but you’ll often gain enough points for candor and for making it easy for me to compensate for the price difference.

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.)

Know what questions I’m likely to have, and answer them. Frequently Asked Questions lists are enormously valuable, especially if They really are FAQs, not marketing pitches masquerading as FAQs (also known as QWWPWAs: Questions We Wish People Would Ask).

Making things more accessible benefits everyone. They know that some adaptations do, like the classic example, closed captioning, which does often come in handy for people who can hear.

The sign was overlaid with a thin piece of Plexiglas, and the message was embossed in Braille on the Plexiglas. Ordinarily, both the print and the Braille would have been half as large so they could both fit on the sign, but with this design each audience got the best possible experience. It was an elegant solution.

Add appropriate alt text to every image. Add an empty (or “null”) alt attribute (<alt="">) for images that screen readers should ignore, and add helpful, descriptive text for the rest.

Put a “Skip to Main Content” link at the beginning of each page. Imagine having to spend 20 seconds (or a minute, or two) listening to the global navigation at the top of every page before you could look at the content, and you’ll understand why this is important.

Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you’ve made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue (“Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%”). There’s an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew.

Speak their language. Instead of talking about the benefits for users, learn what the current vexing corporate problems are and describe your efforts in a way that makes it clear that they’re part of the solution: Talk about things like pain points, touch points, KPIs, and CSI, or whatever management buzzwords are trending in your organization.