Review by: Natalya Murphy, Website Remedies

Would I recommend Don’t Make Me Think?
If your job has anything to do with creating or maintaining a website, this book must be on your desk. Not on your bookshelf collecting dust; on your desk where you can refer to it daily as you work on your website.

Overall stickiness:
I’d rate it as a five-sticky book. You can use the first seven chapters as a step-by-step checklist for evaluating the user-friendliness of your website. The last few chapters give specific instructions for conducting usability tests.

Application:
It’s a three-sticky on application. Concepts such as having a search box or tabbed menus are easy enough to describe, but making them usable is still tricky; the same goes for home pages. Krug devotes an entire chapter to good home page design, but in the end the suggestions there are still just high-level concepts. There is no single solution for making every home page user-friendly. Because there is so much variety between websites and their purpose, it’s impossible to identify a single approach to design that works in all cases. Krug does an excellent job of giving the high-level concepts but he doesn’t give many specifics on how to implement them.

Ideas:

There are two main ideas in this book:

1. People won’t use your website if they can’t find their way around it  The book tells you the specific elements to put on your website to make it easy to navigate.
2. You won’t know if people can find their way around your site unless you do usability testing.  Krug spends an entire chapter showing you how even the most time- and money-challenged businesses can find the time and resources for usability testing. For those wanting more details Krug has published a companion book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, devoted to usability testing.

Style:

Steve Krug writes his book in the same style he recommends for website design: easy to scan, easy to digest. You could take 15 minutes to just skim all the subheadings in the book and come away with the basic concepts.  The tone is light and sprinkled with humor, which makes the book very easy to read. The screen shots and tables are easy to understand and, like the subheadings, give you good information just from skimming them. In the introduction, Krug writes that he intentionally kept the book short enough to be read on a long plane ride.

My Biggest Insight:

The biggest insight I gained from this book is that just because my site design is obvious to me, doesn’t mean it’s obvious to my site visitors – that’s where usability testing comes in. Testing a site’s usability doesn’t have to be a big and scary process – it can be as simple as grabbing someone walking by your desk, asking them to take a look at your site design and asking a few questions or observing how they interact with the website.

Some of the powerful concepts in this book (and how you start applying them today):

Websites are like billboards – they need to quickly convey a message and get the visitor’s attention. Use visual elements on the website to logically group related items and distinguish between more-important and less-important items.

Some web users prefer to find information by using the search box, so make sure your site has a search box… and make sure it actually brings back meaningful results.

Introductory concepts:

1. Site visitors should be able to figure out what a website is about right away, and navigating the site should be easy and intuitive.  Some elements Krug recommends for easy navigation:
   1. A logo in the top left of the page that, when clicked, returns you to the home page.
   2. Standards for navigation menus
   3. A search box
   4. Breadcrumbs (you-are-here indicators)
2. Internet users are looking for a quick answer to their problem. They don’t read web content, they scan it.   Websites should be designed with this fact in mind.
3. Make time for usability testing.  It doesn’t have to take a lot of time and money, so commit to taking one morning a month for usability testing, and involve as many people from the project team as possible.

Where To Get This Book (Nope, this ain’t an affiliate link)
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758

• Author: Steve Krug
• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press; 2nd edition (August 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321344758
• ISBN-13: 978-0321344755

Thanks to: Natalya Murphy, Website Remedies

Posted March 15, 2010 Comments(1)