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

by Krug Steve

How do you choose the tasks to test?

For each round of testing, you need to come up with tasks: the things the participants will try to do.

Keep a separate list of low-hanging fruit.

Resist the impulse to add things. When

Take “new feature” requests with a grain of salt.

Ignore “kayak” problems.

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).

In my experience, many—if not most—serious usability problems are the result of a poor decision about a tradeoff.

One way to deal with a smaller living space is to leave things out: Create a mobile site that is a subset of the full site. Which, of course,

raises a tricky question: Which parts do you leave out?

Mobile ...

In some cases, the lack of space on each screen means that mobile sites become much deeper than their full-size cousins, so you might have to tap down three, four, or five “levels” to get to some features or content.

MANAGING REAL ESTATE CHALLENGES SHOULDN’T BE DONE AT THE COST OF USABILITY3

Don’t hide your affordances under a bushel

Affordances are the meat and potatoes of a visual user interface.

No cursor = no hover = no clue

Touch screens don't provide hover cues, tool tips,etc

As a result, many useful interface features that depended on hover are no longer available, like tool tips,

Flat design: Friend or foe?

Unfortunately, Flat design has a tendency to take along with it not just the potentially distracting decoration but also the useful information that the more textured elements were conveying.

Be careful that your responsive design solutions aren’t loading up pages with huge amounts of code and images that are larger than necessary for the user’s screen.

You may remember that way back on page 9 I mentioned that I’d talk later about attributes that some people include in their definitions of usability: useful, learnable, memorable, effective, efficient, desirable, and delightful.

Personally, my focus has always been on the three that are central to my definition of usability: 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...

For now let’s talk about delight, learnability, and memorability and how they apply to mobile apps.

Key usability principles of mobile

Delightful is the new black

Apps need to be learnable

The people who made Clear have actually done a very good job with training compared to most apps. The first time you use it, you tap your way through a nicely illustrated ten-screen quick tour of the main features.

Be innovative at your peril. "Clear" has to train users on its novel interface.

So far, no one has succeeded.

Apps need to be memorable, too

But by the next time I went to use it I’d forgotten what the trick was again.

WHY YOUR WEB SITE SHOULD BE A MENSCH1

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.

Things that diminish goodwill

Punishing me for not doing things your way. I

Asking me for information you don’t really need.

no one is going to leave a site just because it doesn’t look great. (I tell people to ignore all comments that users make about colors during a user test, unless three out of four people use a word like “puke” to describe the color scheme. Then it’s worth rethinking.

Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy.

UCD focused on designing the right product and making sure that it was usable.

UX sees its role as taking the users’ needs into account at every stage of the product life cycle, from the time they see an ad on TV, through purchasing it and tracking its delivery online, and even returning it to a local branch store.

The bad news is that where usability used to be the standard bearer for user-friendly design, now it’s got a lot of siblings looking for seats at the table, each convinced that their set of tools are the best ones for the job.