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

by Krug Steve

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.

And even if you do have a professional on your team, that person can’t possibly look at everything the team produces. In the last few years, making things more usable has become almost everybody’s responsibility. Visual designers and developers now often find themselves doing things like interaction design (deciding what happens next when the user clicks, taps, or swipes) and information architecture (figuring out how everything should be organized).

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.

I find that the most valuable contributions I make to each project always come from keeping just a few key usability principles in mind.

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.

“Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away”

For instance, it means that as far as is humanly possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory. I should be able to “get it”—what it is and how to use it—without expending any effort thinking about it.

All kinds of things on a Web page can make us stop and think unnecessarily. Take names, for example. Typical culprits are cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names.

Note that these things are always on a continuum somewhere between “Obvious to everybody” and “Truly obscure,”

Another needless source of question marks over people’s heads is links and buttons that aren’t obviously clickable. As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

You may be thinking, “Well, it really doesn’t matter that much. If you click or tap it and nothing happens, what’s the big deal?” The point is that every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand. The distractions may be slight but they add up, especially if it’s something we do all the time like deciding what to click on.

On a self-explanatory page, it takes a little thought to “get it”—but only a little. The appearance of things (like size, color, and layout), their well-chosen names, and the small amounts of carefully crafted text should all work together to create a sense of nearly effortless understanding. Here’s the rule: If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

They may have no choice but to stick with it,

You’d be surprised at how long some people will tough it out on sites that frustrate them,

Besides, who’s to say that the competition will be any less frustrating?

the main reason why it’s important not to make me think is that most people are going to spend far less time looking at the pages we design than we’d like to imagine.

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.

As you might imagine, it’s a little more complicated than this, and it depends on the kind of page, what the user is trying to do, how much of a hurry she’s in, and so on.

One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.

Like Ginger, we tend to focus on words and phrases that seem to match (a) the task at hand or (b) our current or ongoing personal interests. And of course, (c) the trigger words that are hardwired into our nervous systems, like “Free,” “Sale,”

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.

Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

Reading

Faced with any sort of technology, very few people take the time to read instructions. Instead, we forge ahead and muddle through, making up our own vaguely plausible stories about what we’re doing and why it works.

Many people use the Web extensively without knowing that they’re using a browser. What they know is you type something in a box and stuff appears.2 But it doesn’t matter to them: They’re muddling through and using the thing successfully.

If people manage to muddle through so much, does it really matter whether they “get it”? The answer is that it matters a great deal because while muddling through may work sometimes, it tends to be inefficient and error-prone.

If an idea works well enough, other sites imitate it and eventually enough people have seen it in enough places that it needs no explanation. When applied well, Web conventions make life easier for users because they don’t have to constantly figure out what things are and how they’re supposed to work as they go from site to site.

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.

The rule of thumb is that you can—and should—be as creative and innovative as you want, and add as much aesthetic appeal as you can, as long as you make sure it’s still usable.

If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.

accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page: which things are most important, which things are similar, and which things are part of other things. In other words, each page should have a clear visual hierarchy.

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. But when a page doesn’t have a clear visual hierarchy—if everything looks equally important, for instance—we’re reduced to the much slower process of scanning the page for revealing words and phrases and then trying to form our own sense of what’s important and how things are organized. It’s a lot more work.

Eye-tracking studies of Web page scanning suggest that users decide very quickly in their initial glances which parts of the page are likely to have useful information and then rarely look at the other parts—almost as though they weren’t there. (Banner blindness—the ability of users to completely ignore areas they think will contain ads—is just the extreme case.)

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. In the face of limited time and attention, everything that’s not part of the solution must go.

Ginny Redish’s book Letting Go of the Words.

Reading

On the face of it, “number of clicks to get anywhere” seems like a useful metric. But over time I’ve come to think that what really counts is not the number of clicks it takes me to get to what I want (although there are limits), but rather how hard each click is—the amount of thought required and the amount of uncertainty about whether I’m making the right choice. 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

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

Reading

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

just by being there, all the extra words suggest that you may actually need to read them to understand what’s going on, which often makes pages seem more daunting than they actually are.

Happy talk is like small talk—content-free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the point. You can—and should—eliminate as much happy talk as possible.

Another major source of needless words is instructions. The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users finding the information they need are pretty low.

You decide whether to ask first or browse first. The difference is that on a Web site there’s no one standing around who can tell you where things are. The Web equivalent of asking directions is searching—typing a description of what you’re looking for in a search box and getting back a list of links to places where it might be.

Some people (Jakob Nielsen calls them “search-dominant” users) will almost always look for a search box as soon as they enter a site. (These may be the same people who look for the nearest clerk as soon as they enter a store.)

Other people (Nielsen’s “link-dominant” users) will almost always browse first, searching only when they’ve run out

Think of the words we use to describe the experience—like “cruising,” “browsing,” and “surfing.” And clicking a link doesn’t “load” or “display” another page—it “takes you to” a page.

This is one reason why bookmarks—stored personal shortcuts—are so important, and why the Back button is the most used button in Web browsers. It also explains why the concept of Home pages is so important. Home pages are—comparatively—fixed places. When you’re in a site, the Home page is like the North Star. Being able to click Home gives you a fresh start.

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. We’re inherently lost when we’re on the Web, and we can’t peek over the aisles to see where we are. Web navigation compensates for this missing sense of place by embodying the site’s hierarchy, creating a sense of “there.”

Two of the purposes of navigation are fairly obvious: to help us find whatever it is we’re looking for and to tell us where we are.

Web designers use the term persistent navigation (or global navigation) to describe the set of navigation elements that appear on every page of a site.

Just having the navigation appear in the same place on every page with a consistent look gives you instant confirmation that you’re still in the same site—which is more important than you might think. And keeping it the same throughout the site means that (hopefully) you only have to figure out how it works once.

the persistent navigation can sometimes be an unnecessary distraction. For instance, when I’m paying for my purchases on an e-commerce site, you don’t really want me to do anything but finish filling in the forms. The same is true when I’m registering, subscribing, giving feedback, or checking off personalization preferences.