Don’t Make Me Think
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
“This book is a tour de force, and should be required reading for every professional in the industry.”
“After a decade of reviewing books for web professionals, I can say Don’t Make Me Think! is the best. This is the book I recommend to every web professional I know.”
You know that feeling. You land on a new website...and instantly you're overwhelmed. Too many buttons, too much clutter, too many choices. Where do you even start? Your eyes begin darting around rapidly, desperately searching for what you need but it's all just noise - ahhhhh!!?? Click...click...click...getting more lost and frustrated with each misfire.
Finally, you just slam that browser window shut in exasperation and walk away, ready to take your business (and sanity) elsewhere. And just like that, another web experience has royally dropped the ball at making anything obvious or easy to grasp right out of the gate.
In his pioneering masterwork "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability," Steve Krug unpacks exactly why creating painfully complicated user experiences is tragically all too common. More importantly, he lays out a deceptively simple framework for overcoming our worst instincts and crafting streamlined, intuitive websites that don't spark profanity from our users. His philosophy boils down to one core truth:
"The ultimate way to survive on the Web is to turn unexpectedness into something productive rather than allowing it to disrupt and annoy."
Follow Krug's refreshingly practical guidance on embracing simplicity and clarity online, and you'll lock in business for the long haul rather than driving potential customers into the arms of savvier competitors. Here are the fundamental keys:
Prioritize Self-Explanatory Design
The biggest sin designers commit is forcing users to think too much and piece things together on their own. The ultimate pursuit should be creating experiences that are blazingly self-evident and self-explanatory out of the gate:
"The ability to figure things out is not the same as knowing everything from the beginning. Figuring things out causes friction, which is the last thing you want when you're trying to be persuasive."
Rather than clever or tricky, you want to slam users over the head with a glaringly clear starting point and logical path to accomplish tasks. You've gotta make every page and element so obvious that all cognitive energy gets focused on their end goal, rather than suffering tax from trying to understand your interface.
Ditch Insider Jargon & Perspectives
Teams naturally fall into the trap of writing website copy and designing sitemaps based on their internal lingo, culture, and conceptual models. That's a death sentence for usability according to Krug:
"One of the most difficult things to do in life is to put yourself in someone else's shoebox...to escape the lens through which you tend to see things automatically."
You have to continually battle against this built-in perspective bias, almost forcing yourself to approach your website as a blank slate and assume zero familiarity with your nomenclature and processes. Watch real users attempt to navigate your site to identify all the places where the perfectly obvious to you is absolutely opaque to them.
Testing Isn't a Luxury, It's a Requirement
"Of course it tested well...with the people who designed it." The shocking truth is that most companies simply don't perform usability tests with actual target users before unleashing something live for the world. Their rationale usually boils down to "resources" or "deadlines." But as Krug emphasizes:
"There's no such thing as a user-friendly product designed by developers and product managers alone. It will always be a dim shadow of what it could be."
Even tiny doses of testing like having 3-4 users attempt key tasks can unearth major disconnects and fixes that provide exponential clarity returns. Without putting interfaces through legitimate external scrutiny, it's choosing to be willfully negligent.
Embrace Ruthless Conventions & Consistency
As a creative, it's tempting to want to anchor your design around distinctive novel concepts and unconventional elements. But novelty on the web is actually a liability for users attempting to efficiently grok what they're seeing:
"...if you deviate too much from the way people typically do things on the Web, you'll be creating cognitive work and friction for visitors instead of removing it."
Instead of reinventing wheels, you should battle against your ego and stubbornly embrace tried-and-true web conventions wherever possible. Stick to recognizable UI patterns, content hierarchies, and interactive metaphors so people intuitively feel at home. Consistency and standards aren't the enemy of innovation, but the launchpad for it.
Relentlessly Whittle Away Features & Options
"Getting rid of half the words on each page...getting rid of half the features...and working on elevating what's left and presenting it as clearly as possible."
Those are Krug's wise marching orders to combat the scourge of feature bloat and complexity for its own sake.
Every extra button, option, input form, and bit of ancillary content inevitably leads to measurable attention scattering and abandonment for users. Your responsibility is to continually step back, challenge deeply-held assumptions, and pare down relentlessly so you can concentrate all illumination on fulfilling the core critical tasks and journeys.
Less is almost always more on the web. Mastering selectivity and omission allows you to amplify the sheer unobstructed clarity and voice of what remains.
Aggressively Obvious Design Wins
In today's mercilessly competitive world, eradicating friction and confusion from your web experiences needs to be Priority #1, starting from the ground up. As Krug so memorably capsulizes in his opening declaration:
"I should be able to "get it" - what it is and how to use it - without expending any mental effort thinking about it."
Good design shouldn't stand out and scream for attention; truly ingenious design just flatly erases any noticeable hurdles from the equation. It's that unapologetically aggressive commitment to making the obvious choice also the only choice.
We're living in an era where user patience is measured in nanoseconds and there's always an alternative website/app/competitor just one click or swipe away ready to steal attention. The companies thriving over the long haul are those stringently following Krug's gospel - making it insanely easy on people to navigate and accomplish tasks without encountering pointless impediments.
Design doesn't have to be clever, flashy, or revolutionary; it just needs to vacate the premises and let users blissfully focus on whatever matters most to them. Embracing a radical philosophy of simplicity and stripping away every last bit of cognitive friction until only the blazingly clear remains. Don't make them think - that's the ultimate usability.
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