Don't Make Me Think

1The first law: don't make me think

Krug's first law of usability is the title. A page works when it is self-evident: the user looks at it and knows what it is and how to use it, without effort. A page fails when it plants little question marks in the head: where am I? Is that a button? Why did they call it that? "Every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand" (p. 15).

The killer detail: none of these questions is fatal alone. They add up. Enough of them, and the user does what Krug's wife summarizes better than any statistic: "If something is hard to use, I just don't use it as much" (p. 9). Naming things "Jobs" instead of "Job-o-Rama" is not a detail, it is the whole job.

2Nobody reads your page (three uncomfortable facts)

Chapter 2 demolishes the designer's fantasy of the attentive visitor with three facts:

• We don't read, we scan. The user's reality is "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour" (p. 21). Like Gary Larson's dog Ginger, we only hear our trigger words: our task, plus "Free", "Sale", and our own name.
• We don't choose the best option, we satisfice. The term comes from economist Herbert Simon (1957): we take the first reasonable option, because guessing is fast, mistakes are cheap (the Back button), and, Krug adds, "guessing is more fun" (p. 25).
• We don't figure out how things work, we muddle through. Krug watched dozens of users type full URLs into Yahoo's search box; some believed Yahoo WAS the Internet. It worked, so why care?

The conclusion is an order: "If your audience is going to act like you're designing billboards, then design great billboards" (p. 29).

3Billboard design: conventions beat creativity

How do you design for scanners? Five moves: a clear visual hierarchy (important = prominent, related = visually related), conventions, defined zones, obviously clickable things, and less visual noise ("assume that everything is visual noise until proven otherwise", p. 39).

The one developers resist is conventions: designers are paid to be original, and the shopping-cart icon feels like surrender.

Concretely, the "original" site: it replaces the cart icon with a pretty hand-drawn satchel, puts search in the bottom-left, calls its menu "Explore the universe". Each choice is creative, and each makes the visitor hesitate for half a second. The "conventional" site: magnifier top-right, cart next to it, clickable logo that returns home. The user finds them without thinking, because they sit in the same place on every site they know. Krug's rule settles it: "Innovate when you know you have a better idea (and everyone you show it to says 'Wow!'), but take advantage of conventions when you don't" (p. 36). A convention is just an idea that won so hard it became invisible.

4The 3-click rule is wrong (it's not the count, it's the thinking)

The era had a dogma: never more than three clicks to reach anything. Krug's second law replaces counting with weighing: "It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice" (p. 41). His cautious rule of thumb: "three mindless, unambiguous clicks equal one click that requires thought".

A mindless click is "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?": you answer without noticing. A costly click is Symantec asking you to choose "NAV for Windows 95/98" when you don't know that NAV means Norton AntiVirus. The download is three clicks away in both cases; only one of the two paths feels long.

5Remove half the words, then half of what's left

Krug's third law, inherited from E. B. White's "Omit needless words": "Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left" (p. 45). He admits the second half is deliberately excessive; the first half, he insists, is a realistic goal on most pages. Two targets get the firing squad:

• Happy talk must die: the self-congratulating welcome paragraphs. The test: if a tiny voice in your head says "blah blah blah" while reading, it is happy talk (p. 46).
• Instructions must die: nobody reads them until muddling through has failed. The book's demo compresses a 103-word Verizon instruction block to 41 words with zero loss.

6The trunk test

"Navigation isn't just a feature of a Web site; it is the Web site, in the same way that the building, the shelves, and the cash registers are Sears" (p. 59). The web has no physics: no sense of scale, of direction, of location. Navigation is the only thing standing in for all three, and a third of all web clicks at the time were the Back button.

Hence the most reusable audit tool in the book: imagine being "blindfolded and locked in the trunk of a car" (p. 85), driven around, and dumped on a random page deep inside a site, because that is exactly what arriving from a Google result is. Squint at the page. You must be able to answer without hesitation: What site is this? What page am I on? What are the major sections? Where am I in them? How can I search? If those don't pop off the page, the navigation fails.

7User testing for $300 and one morning a month

The most famous chapter kills the excuse that testing is expensive. The traditional version: eight users, a lab with a one-way mirror, $5,000 to $15,000, a 20-page report a week later. Krug's "lost-our-lease" version: three or four users, any office, about $300 in stipends, debrief over lunch the same day. "Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none" (p. 134).

The protocol fits in three rules: three or four users per round ("the ideal number of users for each round of testing is three, or at most four", p. 138); "recruit loosely, and grade on a curve" (testing almost anybody beats testing nobody); and one morning a month, forever. Then triage: fix the head-slappers, ignore the "kayak problems" (the user wobbles, then rights themselves alone), and resist the urge to fix things by adding things.

8The goodwill reservoir

Every visitor arrives with a reservoir of goodwill, and every design decision either drains or refills it. Draining: hiding the support phone number, hiding shipping costs, punishing format errors (spaces in the credit card number), fake sincerity ("your call is important to us"), splash animations in the way. Refilling: making the three main tasks obvious, being upfront about uncomfortable information, saving steps (Amazon putting the package-tracking link right in the email), making error recovery easy, apologizing when you can't do better.

The question Krug leaves you with goes beyond clarity: "Besides 'Is my site clear?' you also need to be asking, 'Does my site behave like a mensch?'". Twenty years later, the cookie-banner industry has answered for many sites, in the wrong direction.