Book of the Week: Don't Make Me Think Revisited
07 Jul 2015
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug is one of those books at the top of a web designers reading list. I read the latest Revisited edition published in 2014, which includes updates for mobile. He updated the book once in 2006 to make more money on royalties. This time he updated the book to reflect the changes to the web since then, which is mainly mobile. This is a good quick read for anyone who builds websites. Definition of Usability
A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to sue the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it’s worth.
In order to talk about something, we must first define it. Krug breaks down the attributes of usability into
- Useful : Does it do something people need done?
- Learnable : Can people figure out how to use it?
- Memorable : Do they have to relearn it each time they use it?
- Effective : Does it get the job done?
- Efficient : Does it do it with a reasonable amount of time and effort?
- Desirable : Do people want it?
- Delightful : Is it enjoyable, or even fun?
**Krug’s Laws of Usability**
- Don’t make me think
- It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.
- Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.
The first law deals with decreasing cognitive load. A person has only so much energy. You want to preserve their energy as they go through your site. You need to make things obvious and easy for the user.
Too-subtle visual cues are actually a very common problem. Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.
People scan through a webpage like how drivers look at billboards as they are driving by. They aren’t going to read your webpage like a novel. They want to find what they are looking for and they want it now. You can assist the second law by providing guidance that is brief, timely and unavoidable. The third law borrows from The Elements of Style rule #17: omit needless words. You want to remove the noise. People add useless words, because they don’t really have anything to say. **Navigation and Home Page**
Even people who manage Web sites often have very little idea how big their sites really are.
The bread and butter of a webpage are the navigation and homepage. There are two longer chapters devoted to these two. Often there are so many stakeholders that want a piece of the homepage, you’re left with a compromise that makes everyone unhappy. People will either use the search first or click through the navigation. The problem with search is that google has spoiled us all. We expect search to work great with spell correction, autosuggest and relevant results. When that experience falls short, your site isn’t very usable. Usability Test
Usability testing has been around for a long time, and the basic idea is pretty simple: If you want to know whether something is easy enough to use, watch some people while they try to use it and note where they run into problems.
One important thing is to start usability test early in the design process and to do it often. Krug suggests to do it once a month with 3 people. You will often find more problems than you have resources and time to solve, so you should prioritize. Krug has another book called Rocket Surgery Made Easy that outlines his approach to usability testing.