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

  Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited

  A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

  Steve Krug

  Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited

  A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

  Copyright © 2014 Steve Krug

  New Riders

  www.newriders.com

  To report errors, please send a note to [email protected]

  New Riders is an imprint of Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education.

  Editor: Elisabeth Bayle

  Project Editor: Nancy Davis

  Production Editor: Lisa Brazieal

  Copy Editor: Barbara Flanagan

  Interior Design and Composition: Romney Lange

  Illustrations by Mark Matcho and Mimi Heft

  Farnham fonts provided by The Font Bureau, Inc. (www.fontbureau.com)

  Notice of Rights

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact [email protected].

  Notice of Liability

  The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

  Trademarks

  It’s not rocket surgery™ is a trademark of Steve Krug.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-321-96551-6

  ISBN-10: 0-321-96551-5

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  First Edition

  To my father, who always wanted me to write a book,

  My mother, who always made me feel like I could,

  Melanie, who married me—the greatest stroke of good fortune of my life,

  and my son, Harry, who will surely write books much better than this one whenever he wants to.

  Second Edition

  To my big brother, Phil, who was a mensch his whole life.

  Third Edition

  To all the people—from all parts of the world—who have been so nice about this book for fourteen years. Your kind words—in person, in email, and in your blogs—have been one of the great joys of my life.

  Especially the woman who said it made her laugh so hard that milk came out of her nose.

  Contents

  PREFACE About this edition

  INTRODUCTION Read me first

  Throat clearing and disclaimers

  GUIDING PRINCIPLES

  CHAPTER 1 Don’t make me think!

  Krug’s First Law of Usability

  CHAPTER 2 How we really use the Web

  Scanning, satisficing, and muddling through

  CHAPTER 3 Billboard Design 101

  Designing for scanning, not reading

  CHAPTER 4 Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

  Why users like mindless choices

  CHAPTER 5 Omit words

  The art of not writing for the Web

  THINGS YOU NEED TO GET RIGHT

  CHAPTER 6 Street signs and Breadcrumbs

  Designing navigation

  CHAPTER 7 The Big Bang Theory of Web Design

  The importance of getting people off on the right foot

  MAKING SURE YOU GOT THEM RIGHT

  CHAPTER 8 “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends”

  Why most arguments about usability are a waste of time, and how to avoid them

  CHAPTER 9 Usability testing on 10 cents a day

  Keeping testing simple—so you do enough of it

  LARGER CONCERNS AND OUTSIDE INFLUENCES

  CHAPTER 10 Mobile: It’s not just a city in Alabama anymore

  Welcome to the 21st Century. You may experience a slight sense of vertigo

  CHAPTER 11 Usability as common courtesy

  Why your Web site should be a mensch

  CHAPTER 12 Accessibility and you

  Just when you think you’re done, a cat floats by with buttered toast strapped to its back

  CHAPTER 13 Guide for the perplexed

  Making usability happen where you live

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface: About this edition

  People come and go so quickly here!

  —DOROTHY GALE (JUDY GARLAND) IN THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

  I wrote the first edition of Don’t Make Me Think back in 2000.

  By 2002, I began to get a few emails a year from readers asking (very politely) if I’d thought about updating it. Not complaining; just trying to be helpful. “A lot of the examples are out of date” was the usual comment.

  My standard response was to point out that since I wrote it right around the time the Internet bubble burst, many of the sites I used as examples had already disappeared by the time it was published. But I didn’t think that made the examples any less clear.

  Finally, in 2006 I had a strong personal incentive to update it.1 But as I reread it to see what I should change, I just kept thinking “This is all still true.” I really couldn’t find much of anything that I thought should be changed.

  1 Half of the royalties for the book were going to a company that no longer existed, and doing a new edition meant a new contract—and twice the royalties—for me.

  If it was a new edition, though, something had to be different. So I added three chapters that I didn’t have time to finish back in 2000, hit the snooze button, and happily pulled the covers back over my head for another seven years.

  2000

  2006

  (Writing is really hard for me, and I’m always happy to have a reason not to do it. Give me a good old root canal over writing any day.)

  So why now, finally, a new edition? Two reasons.

  #1. Let’s face it: It’s old

  There’s no doubt about it at this point: It feels dated. After all, it’s thirteen years old, which is like a hundred years in Internet time. (See? Nobody even says things like “in Internet time” anymore.)

  Most of the Web pages I used for examples, like Senator Orrin Hatch’s campaign site for the 2000 election, look really old-fashioned now.

  Sites these days tend to look a lot more sophisticated, as you might expect.

  www.orrinhatch.com 1999

  www.orrinhatch.com 2012

  Recently I’ve been starting to worry that the book would finally reach a point where it felt so dated that it would stop being effective. I know it hasn’t happened yet because

  It’s still selling steadily (thank heavens), without any sign of slowing down. It’s even become required reading in a lot of courses, something I never expected.

  New readers from all over the world continue to tweet about things they’ve learned from it
.

  I still keep hearing this story: “I gave it to my boss, hoping he’d finally understand what I’m talking about. He actually read it, and then he bought it for our whole team/department/company!” (I love that story.)

  People keep telling me that they got their job thanks in part to reading it or that it influenced their choice of a career.2

  2 I’m enormously pleased and flattered, but I have to admit there’s always a part of me that’s thinking “Yikes! I hope she wasn’t meant to be a brain surgeon. What have I done?”

  But I know that eventually the aging effect is going to keep people from reading it, for the same reason that it was so hard to get my son to watch black and white movies when he was young, no matter how good they were.

  Clearly, it’s time for new examples.

  #2. The world has changed

  To say that computers and the Internet and the way we use them have changed a lot lately is putting it mildly. Very mildly.

  The landscape has changed in three ways:

  Technology got its hands on some steroids. In 2000, we were using the Web on relatively large screens, with a mouse or touchpad and a keyboard. And we were sitting down, often at a desk, when we did.

  Now we use tiny computers that we carry around with us all the time, with still and video cameras, magical maps that know exactly where we are, and our entire libraries of books and music built in. And are always connected to the Internet. Oh, and they’re phones, too.

  Heck, I can use my “phone” to

  ...book a restaurant reservation in seconds

  ...adjust the heat in my house from anywhere

  ...or deposit a check without going to an ATM

  It’s no flying car (which, come to think of it, we were promised we’d have by now), but it’s pretty impressive.

  The Web itself kept improving. Even when I’m using my desktop computer to do all the things I’ve always done on the Web (buying stuff, making travel plans, connecting with friends, reading the news, and settling bar bets), the sites I use tend to be much more powerful and useful than their predecessors.

  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.

  Usability went mainstream. In 2000, not that many people understood the importance of usability.

  Now, thanks in large part to Steve Jobs (and Jonathan Ive), almost everyone understands that it’s important, even if they’re still not entirely sure what it is. Except now they usually call it User Experience Design (UXD or just UX), an umbrella term for any activity or profession that contributes to a better experience for the user.

  It’s great that there’s now so much more emphasis on designing for the user, but all the new job descriptions, subspecialties, and tools that have come along with this evolution have left a lot of people confused about what they should actually do about it.

  I’ll be talking about all three of these changes throughout the book.

  Don’t get me wrong...

  This edition has new examples, some new principles, and a few things I’ve learned along the way, but it’s still the same book, with the same purpose: It’s still a book about designing great, usable Web sites.

  And it’s also still a book about designing anything that people need to interact with, whether it’s a microwave oven, a mobile app, or an ATM.

  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.3

  3 There’s a wonderful Norwegian video (with subtitles) about this that shows a monk getting help as he struggles to use the newfangled “book.” (Search for “medieval helpdesk” on YouTube.)

  Or as Jakob Nielsen so aptly put it:

  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.

  I hope you enjoy the new edition. And don’t forget to wave in a few years when you pass me in your flying car.

  STEVE KRUG

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Introduction: Read me first

  THROAT CLEARING AND DISCLAIMERS

  I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But I’d like to clarify a few things.

  —JOE FERRARA, A HIGH SCHOOL FRIEND OF MINE

  I have a great job. I’m a usability consultant. Here’s what I do:

  People (“clients”) send me something they’re working on.

  It could be designs for a new Web site they’re building, or the URL of a site that they’re redesigning, or a prototype of an app.

  I try using what they send me, doing the things that their users would need or want to do with it. I note the places where people are likely to get stuck and the things that I think will confuse them (an “expert usability review”).

  Sometimes I get other people to try using it while I watch to see where they get stuck and confused (“usability testing”).

  I have a meeting with the client’s team to describe the problems I found that are likely to cause users grief (“usability issues”) and help them decide which ones are most important to fix and how best to fix them.

  Sometimes we work by the phone...

  ...and sometimes in person

  I used to write what I called the “big honking report” detailing my findings, but I finally realized that it wasn’t worth the time and effort. A live presentation allows people to ask me questions and voice their concerns—something a written report doesn’t do. And for teams doing Agile or Lean development, there’s no time for written reports anyway.

  They pay me.

  Being a consultant, I get to work on interesting projects with a lot of nice, smart people. I get to work at home most of the time and I don’t have to sit in mind-numbing meetings every day or deal with office politics. I get to say what I think, and people usually appreciate it. And I get paid well.

  On top of all that, I get a lot of job satisfaction, because when we’re finished, the things they’re building are almost always much better than when we started.1

  1 Almost always. Even when people know about usability problems, they can’t always fix them completely, as I’ll explain in Chapter 9.

  The bad news: You probably don’t have a usability professional

  Almost every development team could use somebody like me to help them build usability into their products. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them can’t afford to hire a usability professional.

  And even if they could, there aren’t enough to go around. At last count there were umpteen billion Web sites (and umpteen billion apps for the iPhone alone2) and only about 10,000 usability consultants worldwide. You do the math.

  2 I’m not quite sure why Apple brags about this. Having thousands of good apps for a platform is a really good thing. Having millions of mediocre apps just means it’s really hard to find the good ones.

  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).

  I wrote this book mainly for people who can’t afford to hire (or rent) someone like me.

  Knowing some usability principles will help you see the problems yourself—and help keep you from creating them in the first place.

  No question: If you can afford to, hire someone like me. But if you can’t, I hope this book will enable you to do it yourself (in your copious spare time).

  The good news: It’s not rocket surgery™
/>   Fortunately, much of what I do is just common sense, and anyone with some interest can learn to do it.

  Like a lot of common sense, though, it’s not necessarily obvious until after someone’s pointed it out to you.3

  3 ...which is one reason why my consulting business is called Advanced Common Sense. “It’s not rocket surgery” is my corporate motto.

  I spend a lot of my time telling people things they already know, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking “I knew that” a lot in the pages ahead.

  © 2013. The New Yorker Collection from cartoonbank.com All Rights Reserved.

  It’s a thin book

  More good news: I’ve worked hard to keep this book short—hopefully short enough so you can read it on a long plane ride. I did this for two reasons:

  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.

  4 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.

  Usability isn’t your life’s work, and you don’t have time for a long book.

  You don’t need to know everything. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful for you to learn.5

  5 I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he can’t afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones: