Steve Krug - Dont Make Me Think (Summary): A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

The principles of good web design are just common sense and you can learn to apply them. A great website must have usability, in that it must work for customers, serve your purposes and be easy to use. If clients find your site difficult to use, theyll avoid it, and yet theres no single right approach to designing a website.

In the past 10 years Ive spent a lot of time watching people use the web, and the thing that has struck me most is the difference between how we think people use websites and how they actually use them.

To begin, simplify your site. Dont make me think! is the first law of usability. People should never be confused about what to do, where to go or what to click to find what they want. Make everything on your site obvious and clickable. If your users have to ask about how things work, theyll get distracted. Even if their mental chatter only lasts a fraction of a second, its too long. Users should never, ever have to ask, Where am I? or Where should I begin?

What you cant make...self-evident, make self-explanatory. Design your website to answer peoples questions with a few words. Usability is a form of courtesy, so be polite to your users. When people enter your site, they begin with a half-full reservoir of goodwill. An organized home page fills that reservoir to the top. If you leave outdated material on your site, the reservoir evaporates. Exclude key information or push promotions too hard, and the reservoir will go dry. You diminish goodwill by making information difficult to find, punishing users for mistakes, using corporate jargon, or making your site flashy or amateurish. Increase goodwill with a clear and accessible site that eliminates steps, shares key data, anticipates questions, apologizes for mistakes and makes pages printer-friendly.

People dont use the internet the way you think they do. Your website designer probably thinks users pore over every page, and read every word of text. The designer may imagine readers figuring out the organizational scheme and weighing their options before clicking. In reality, people glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first thing that attracts their attention or sounds vaguely like what theyre seeking thats if youre lucky. Designers and marketing people might try to convince you that your website should be great literature. In practice, people experience your site more like a billboard that they zoom past on the freeway.

Left to their own devices, web development teams arent notoriously successful at making decisions about usability questions.

People dont read online. They scan quickly, spot a few signposts to orient themselves and move on. They dont want to take time to make the best choice possible. Instead, they take the first reasonable option, a practice known as satisficing. Scholars who study decision-making report that this is a common practice in the real world, even when people have a lot at stake. Online, where theres no penalty for making a wrong choice, this approach prevails. Users will not spend enough time on your website to figure out how things work. They muddle through, making good-enough decisions to get what they want. Once something works well enough, people tend to stick to it. This is the reality you must work with; you can get frustrated and complain or get really good at designing billboards that meet people online where they really live.

Do the following five essential things to help people use your web pages more productively and efficiently:

• Create a clear visual hierarchy Design every web page to clearly and accurately portray the relationships among the things on the page. Draw attention to important aspects with visual cues, like bold, larger fonts. Link things visually as they are linked conceptually. Nest items to show clearly which ones are parts of others.
• Take advantage of conventions Many designers dont want to use conventions. They think their job is to create something new and different, and theyre afraid that something familiar like a shopping cart icon will be boring. But conventions endure because they work. People know how to use them. Theyre accustomed to following conventional cues to cull meaning from written texts. Innovate only if you have an idea that works better than a convention. Otherwise, use recognizable icons like an image of a shopping cart even if you didnt come up with the idea yourself.
• Break up pages into clearly defined areas Make distinctions between different areas absolutely clear. Enable quick navigational decisions.
• Make it obvious whats clickable People click to get to the next thing. Make that click as easy as possible. For clickable links, always choose different colors than the colors you use for regular text. Make sure indicator arrows point precisely to where people should click.
• Minimize noise The web is busy. You cant get rid of all the distractions but avoid any distractions you can. Dont make your pages busy. Remove exclamation points, extra links and extraneous colors. Subtract anything that draws users away from your focus.

Since a large part of what people are doing on the Web is looking for the next thing to click, its important to make it obvious whats clickable and whats not.

You might have read a web design rule defining a maximum number of clicks people will make. You might think users should reach any page on your site within a set number of clicks. The true limiting factor is not number of clicks, but how hard each click is. Every time you make people think about their choices, it costs you as much as three mindless, unambiguous clicks. To simplify users choices, focus their attention, eliminate noise and make pages shorter. Clarify the relationships among every element on a page and jettison as much content as possible.