Book review
Don't Make Me Think -
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
New Riders Press, 2000 (224pp)
Author: Steve Krug
Review by Donald Clark - Epic
First published in 2000, this has become a classic
in web and
e-learning design. It is almost faultless in its recommendations,
brilliantly written and knocks the stuffing out of those who think
designing for the screen is all about freeform creativity.
As he manages to distil a great deal of his considerable experience
in design and usability testing, this book is really a portable
expert in one slim volume. Show this guy a web site or piece of
e-learning and he’ll nail the problems in seconds.
It is, without doubt, the best usability book I’ve read.
It avoids the overblown approaches of Norman and Nielsen (who are
still worth reading), and, above all, it is practical and doesn’t
shy away from giving concrete examples and advice. He tells it straight
and his advice can be turned into immediate action.
Krug’s first law of usability is to strive to make things
self-evident or self-explanatory, hence the title ‘Don’t
Make Me Think’. He gets off to a cracking start by asking
a simple question - "how do we really use the web?" We
glance, scan and muddle through. We don’t read pages, we scan
them, choose the first reasonable option, and because we’re
lazy, we meander through content. This is an important point and,
if excesses in design are to be avoided, one that has to be understood
when designing e-learning and web sites. Jakob Nielsen backed this
up with experiments showing how readability can be increased by
judicious editing.
Not writing for the screen
Omit needless words – the art of not writing for the screen.
Half the number of words and half again. Enough said.
Structure and navigation
Taking his lead from newspapers, always a worthy source for screen
design, he recommends carefully designed hierarchies and the use
of conventions such as shopping carts. This is sound advice. Conventions
are more than just objects of convenience, they are part of the
grammar of interface design. Designers often refuse to use conventions
as they crave creativity and innovation – this is just plain
stupid. Pages should also be broken up into carefully defined areas,
clickable areas should be obvious and every attempt made to minimise
‘noise’.
In the most substantial chapter of the book, chapter 6, he again
stresses conventions. Don’t play fast and loose, make things
easy and consistent. This means persistent global navigation at
the same position on every page with a home button and tracking.
He loves those tabs you get on Amazon. He also makes the useful
distinction between sections of content and utilities such as print,
search and so on. He also tackles the issue of wide versus deep
hierarchies. There could have been lots more here on the clustering
of navigational items and what he regards as conventions. He hates
navigation that breaks down when you get past the second level.
And if you don’t know what ‘breadcrumbs’ are,
you really should buy this book. (There’s a great footnote
about a navigational experiment on p87 – buy the book to read
it.) He’s on the button when it comes to general advice on
both structure and navigation.
Design options
Home pages matter and Krug provides excellent advice on features
and layout. His focus is on the Big Picture, namely the essential
purpose of the site or e-learning programme is right. He loves tag
lines that capture the essence of a site or web experience along
with consistency in navigation. Mission statements he hates as they
rarely tell you the real story and usually miss the Big Picture.
He also reviles badly designed rollovers, poorly designed pull down
menus, unnecessary banner ads and the over promotion of other sites.
The chapter includes two excellent examples, where he takes the
reader through 4/5 redesigns of their home pages.
Chapter 8 is a must read section. Photocopy these seven pages and
distribute them to your team. He describes those endless design
arguments driven largely by job role. Developers want lots of cool
features, designers want visually interesting sites, clients want
whiz. He calls this the hype versus craft culture clash. His remedy
– ignore the myth of the average user, test with real users.
He’s also right on the Flash debate. Some will love it, others
hate it. Actually what both object to is Flash used badly.
Usability testing
The final three chapters (9,10,11) are a practical and refreshing
look at usability testing. He recommends using just one or a few
early on, rather than larger numbers on end-point testing. Following
Nielsen and Landauer he takes the view that a few good testers and
a few iterations are all you need. Forget the large-scale focus
groups and massive testing, which suffer from the law of diminishing
returns. Use a camcorder with a facilitator who asks questions,
give them tasks, especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you
probe the user for their understanding of the point of the experience,
how it works and how it is organised. The point of the facilitator
is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at
but what they’re thinking. Listen, keep an open mind and take
lots of notes. He even provides a probing script to follow. This
is wonderful stuff.
An underlying point, made many years before by Dewey and Heidegger
is that technologies hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology
is at its best when it is invisible. This is the task of the designer,
to make the delivery mechanism as invisible as possible.
The book is delightfully designed, written in a lively style, moves
at a fair old clip with great graphics. It’s short, sharp
and sensible.
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