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

by Krug Steve

it’s crucial that you let them work on their own and don’t do or say anything to influence them. Don’t ask them leading questions, and don’t give them any clues or assistance unless they’re hopelessly stuck or extremely frustrated.

Probing (5 minutes). After the tasks, you can ask the participant questions about anything that happened during the test and any questions that the people in the observation room would like you to ask.

I recommend that you debrief over lunch right after you do the tests, while everything is still fresh in the observers’ minds.

Whenever you test, you’re almost always going to find some serious usability problems. Unfortunately, they aren’t always the ones that get fixed. Often, for instance, people will say, “Yes, that’s a real problem. But that functionality is all going to change soon, and we can live with it until then.” Or faced with a choice between trying to fix one serious problem or a lot of simple problems, they opt for the low-hanging fruit.

When you feel like you’ve allocated all of the time and resources you have available in the next month for fixing usability problems, STOP. You’ve got what you came for. The group has now decided what needs to be fixed and made a commitment to fixing it.

When it’s obvious in testing that users aren’t getting something, the team’s first reaction is usually to add something, like an explanation or some instructions. But very often the right solution is to take something (or some things) away that are obscuring the meaning, rather than adding yet another distraction.

In general, if the user’s second guess about where to find things is always right, that’s good enough.

what’s different about usability when you’re designing for use on a mobile device? In one sense, the answer is: Not much. The basic principles are still the same. If anything, people are moving faster and reading even less on small screens.

One approach was Mobile First. Instead of designing a full-featured (and perhaps bloated) version of your Web site first and then paring it down to create the mobile version, you design the mobile version first based on the features and content that are most important to your users. Then you add on more features and content to create the desktop/full version.

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. This means that people will be tapping more, but that’s OK. With small screens it’s inevitable: To see the same amount of information, you’re going to be either tapping or scrolling a lot more. As long as the user continues to feel confident that what they want is further down the screen or behind that link or button, they’ll keep going.

The siren song of one-design-fits-all-screen-sizes has a long history of bright hopes, broken promises, and weary designers and developers. If there are two things I can tell you about scalable design (a/k/a dynamic layout, fluid design, adaptive design, and responsive design), they’re these: It tends to be a lot of work. It’s very hard to do it well. In the past, scalable design—creating one version of a site that would look good on many different size screens—was optional. It seemed like a good idea, but very few people actually cared about it. Now that small screens are taking over, everybody cares: If you have a Web site, you have to make it usable on any size screen.

(The current convention is to put a Mobile Site/Full Site toggle at the bottom of every page.)

Affordances are visual clues in an object’s design that suggest how we can use it.

Memorability can be a big factor in whether people adopt an app for regular use. Usually when you purchase one, you’ll be willing to spend some time right away figuring out how to use it. But if you have to invest the same effort the next time, it’s unlikely to feel like a satisfying experience. Unless you’re very impressed by what it does, there’s a good chance you’ll abandon it—which is the fate of most apps.

One of the main reasons why mobile testing is complicated is that some of the tools we rely on for desktop testing don’t exist yet for mobile devices. As of this writing, robust mobile screen recording and screen sharing apps aren’t available, mainly because the mobile operating systems tend to prohibit background processes. And the devices don’t really have quite enough horsepower to run them anyway.

mirroring isn’t a good way to watch tests done on touch screen devices, because you can’t see the gestures and taps the participant is making.

If you’re going to capture fingers, there’s going to be a camera involved. (Some mirroring software will shows dots and streaks on the screen, but it’s not the same thing.)

If you attach the camera to the device, the participant can move it freely and the screen will stay in view and in focus.

I’m really not a fan of the face camera. Some observers like seeing the participant’s face, but I think it’s actually a distraction. I’d much rather have observers focus on what’s happening on the screen, and they can almost always tell what the user is feeling from their tone of voice anyway.

is tethered: It requires a USB extension cable running from the camera to your laptop. But you can buy a long extension inexpensively.

“Is my site clear?” you also need to be asking, “Does my site behave like a mensch?”

The reservoir is limited, and if you treat users badly enough and exhaust it there’s a good chance that they’ll leave. But leaving isn’t the only possible negative outcome; they may not be as eager to use your site in the future, or they may think less of your organization and savage you on Facebook or Twitter. For those of you in marketing, your NPS (Net Promoter Score) probably goes down.

The most common things to hide are customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, and prices.

The whole point of hiding support phone numbers is to try to keep users from calling, because each call costs money. The usual effect is to diminish goodwill and ensure that they’ll be even more annoyed when they do find the number and call. On the other hand, if the 800 number is in plain sight—perhaps even on every page—somehow knowing that they can call if they want to is often enough to keep people looking for the information on the site longer, increasing the chances that they’ll solve the problem themselves.

Some sites hide pricing information in hopes of getting users so far into the process that they’ll feel vested in it by the tim...

Many sites perversely insist on no spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much easier to type the number correctly.

Most users are very skeptical of requests for personal information and find it annoying if a site asks for more than what’s needed for the task at hand.

Note that while people love to make comments about the appearance of sites—especially about whether they like the colors—almost no one is going to leave a site just because it doesn’t look great.

There may be times when you’ll choose to have your site do some of these user-unfriendly things deliberately. Sometimes it makes business sense not to do exactly what the customer wants. For instance, uninvited pop-ups almost always annoy people to some extent. But if your statistics show you can get 10 percent more revenue by using pop-ups and you think it’s worth annoying your users, you can do it. It’s a business decision. Just be sure you do it in an informed way, rather than inadvertently.

Be upfront about things like shipping costs, hotel daily parking fees, service outages—anything you’d rather not be upfront about.

Save me steps wherever you can.

You keep them up to date. Customer Service and Technical Support can easily give you a list of this week’s five most frequently asked questions.

you really can’t say your site is usable unless it’s accessible.

Every time I go to a client’s office I spend most of my time marveling at the fact that so many people can survive in the corporate world. I’m just not equipped for dealing with the office politics in a large (i.e., more than two people) organization and sitting in meetings all day.

Everybody loves learning about the competition, and because it’s not your site being tested, no one has anything personally on the line. It makes a great brown bag lunch event.

But there’s a trend—which I first noticed about five years ago—for some people3 to try to get usability practitioners to help them figure out how to manipulate users rather than serve their needs.

I have no problem with the idea of people asking for our help influencing users.

I don’t have a problem with helping to persuade people to do things, either, as long as it’s not deceptive.

But I get anxious whenever I hear people talk about using usability tests to help determine whether something is desirable, because it’s just not something usability tests are good for measuring.

Instead, they’re looking to usability to tell them how to make people think it’s desirable, i.e., to manipulate them. Sometimes the intended manipulation is relatively benign, like using a slightly hidden checkbox checked by default to automatically sign you up for a newsletter. Sometimes it inches closer to the darkness, doing things like tricking people into installing an unwanted browser toolbar5 and changing their default search and Home page settings while they’re not looking. We’ve all been on the receiving end of this kind of deception.