Don't Make Me Think Revisited by Steve Krug

• 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.
• Like a lot of common sense, though, it's [usability] not necessarily obvious until after someone's pointed it out to you.
• If something requires a large investment of time--or looks like it will--it's less likely to be used.
• 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.
• Usability principles:
• 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 using it enjoyable, or even fun?
• Don't make me think! For as long as I can remember, I've been telling people that this is my first law of usability.
• My main point is that the trade offs should usually be skewed further in the direction of "obvious" than we think.
• As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable--or not.
• The point is that every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand The distractions may be slight but they add up, especially if it's something we do all the time like deciding what to click on.
• As a rule, people don't like to puzzle over how to do things.
• The most important thing you can do is to understand the basic principle of eliminating question marks.
• Your goal should be for each page or screen to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it. In other words, they'll "get it" without having to think about it.
• Here's the rule: If you can't make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.
• We don't read pages. We scan them.
• Most web use involves trying to get something done, and usually done quickly.
• We knew we don't need to read everything. On most pages, we're really only interested in a fraction of what's on the page. We're just looking for the bits that match our interests or the task at hand, and the rest of it is irrelevant. Scanning is how we find the relevant bits.
• We don't make optimal choices. We satisfice.
• In reality, most of the time we don't choose the best option--we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.
• We don't figure out how things work. We muddle through.
• Faced with any sort of technology, very few people take the time to read instructions. Instead, we forge ahead and muddle through, making up our own vaguely plausible stories about what we're doing and why it works.
• Muddling through is not limited to beginners. Even technically savvy users often have surprising gaps in their understanding of how things work.
• It's not important for us. For most of us, it doesn't matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It's not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring. It's just not important to us.
• If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works--no matter how badly--we tend not to look for a better way. We'll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.
• If your audience is going to act like you're designing billboards, then design great billboards.
• Conventions are your friends.
• One of the best ways to make almost anything easier to grasp in a hurry is to follow the existing conventions--the widely used or standardized design patterns.
• Occasionally, time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But usually it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.
• If you're going to innovate, you have to understand the value of what you're replacing, and it's easy to underestimate just how much value conventions provide.
• If you're not going to use an existing web convention, you need to be sure that what you're replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory that there's no learning curve--so it's as good as the convention, or (b) adds so much value that it's worth a small learning curve.
• My recommendation: Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don't.
• The rule of thumb is that you can--and should--be as creative and innovative as you want, and add as much aesthetic appeal as you can, as long as you make sure it's still usable.
• Here's the rule to keep in mind: Clarity trumps consistency.
• If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.
• Pages with a clear visual hierarchy have three traits:
• The more important something is, the more prominent it is.
• Things that are related logically are related visually.
• Things are "nested" visually to show what's part of what.
• A good visual hierarchy saves us work by preprocessing the page for us, organizing and prioritizing its contents in a way that we can grasp almost instantly.
• Dividing the page into clearly defined areas is important because it allows users to decide quickly which areas of the page to focus on and which areas they can safely ignore.
• Since a large part of what people are doing on the web is looking for the next thing to click, it's important to make it easy to tell what's clickable.
• The truth is, everything can't be important.
• Use bulleted lists. Think of it this way: Almost anything that can be a bulleted list probably should be a bulleted list. Just look at your paragraphs for any series of items separated by commas or semicolons and you'll find likely candidates.
• Krug's Second Law of Usability:
• It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.
• It general, I think it's safe to say that users don't mind a lot of clicks as long as each click is painless and they have continued confidence that they're on the right track--following what's often called the "scent of information".
• I think the rule of thumb might be something like: "three mindless, unambiguous clicks equal one click that requires thought".
• Krug's Third Law of Usability:
• Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left.
• Another major source of needless words is instructions. The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them--at least not until after repeated attempts at "muddling through" have failed.
• Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum.
• People won't use your web site if they can't find their way around it.
• Two of the purposes of navigation are fairly obvious: to help us find whatever it is we're looking for and to tell us where we are.
• Clear, well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression.
• One of the most crucial items in the persistent navigation is a button or link that takes me to the site's home page.
• In general, if you're a designer and you think a visual cue is sticking out like a sore thumb, it probably means you need to make it twice as prominent.
• For tabs to work to full effect, the graphics have to create the visual illusion that the active tab is in front of the other tabs. This is the main thing that makes them feel like tabs--even more than the distinctive tab shape.
• One of the most valuable bits of real estate is the space right next to the Site ID. When we see a phrase that's visually connected to the ID, we know it's meant to be a tagline, and so we read it as a description of the whole site.
• The Tragedy of the Commons:
• Any shared resource (a "commons") will inevitably be destroyed by overuse.
• Most teams end up spending a lot of previous time rehashing the same issues over and over.
• All web users are unique and all web use is basically idiosyncratic.
• Focus groups are good for quickly getting a sampling of users' feelings and opinions about things.
• Usability tests are about watching one person at a time try to use something to do typical tasks so you can detect and fix the things that confuse or frustrate them.
• The main difference is that in usability tests, you watch people actually use things, instead of just listening to them talk about them.
• If you want a great site, you've got to test it. After you've worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can't see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to watch other people try to use it.
• Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none.
• Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site.
• 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.
• Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end.
• A simple test early--while you still have the time to use what you learn from it--is almost always more valuable than an elaborate test later.
• You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.
• Focus ruthlessly on fixing the most serious problems first.
• Whenever you're designing, you're dealing with constraints. And where there are constraints, there are tradeoffs to be made.
• Most of the challenges in creating good mobile usability boil down to making good tradeoffs.
• One way to deal with a smaller living space is to leave things out: Create a mobile site that is a subset of the full site.
• The most obvious thing about mobile screens is that they're small.
• Managing real estate challenges shouldn't be done at the cost of usability.
• Affordances are visual clues in an object's design that suggest how we can use it.
• Affordances are the meat and potatoes of a visual user interface.
• Slow performance equals frustration for users and loss of goodwill for publishers.
• Delightful apps usually come from marrying an idea about something people would really enjoy being able to do, but don't imagine is possible, with a bright idea about how to use some new technology to accomplish it.
• Building delight into mobile apps has become increasingly important because the app market is so competitive. Just doing something well isn't good enough to create a hit; you have to do something incredibly well. Delight is sort of like the extra credit assignment of user experience design.
• Making your app delightful is a fine objective. Just don't focus so much attention on it that you forget to make it usable, too.
• One of the biggest problems with apps is that if they have more than a few features they may not be very easy to learn.
• There's one more attribute that's important: memorability. Once you've figured out how to use an app, will you remember how to use it the next time you try or will you have to start over again from scratch?
• If it's easy to learn the first time, it's easy to learn the second time.
• 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.
• Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy.
• Making sites more usable for "the rest of us" is one of the most effective ways to make them more effective for people with disabilities.
• The single best thing you can do to improve your site's accessibility is to test it often, and continually smooth out the parts that confuse everyone.
• The best way to learn how to make anything more usable is to watch people actually try to use it.
• Usability is about serving people better by building better products.
• Krug's Laws:
• 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.