Book Review: Don't Make Me Think!
Friday October 07th 2005
For my MMP002C module, "Web Design and Usability", our rich reading list includes the highly-praised and well-known book by Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Having known about this book for a while myself, I was pleased to see it listed as a suggested resource, and eager to dig in. The book is meant to be a quick read, so I devoured it in the first day that I had my hands on it. And after a second perusal to be sure I've soaked everything in, I can say it is a wonderfully succinct, effective book.
It reminds me of "Who Moved My Cheese" in that it presents every day conflicts and issues with fresh, well-worded thoughts. Neither claim that their subject is rocket science (Krug's corporate motto is "It's Not Rocket Surgery(TM)"), and both back that premise up with straight-forward talk and easy-to-remember rules. Even though things are simple on the surface, they still leave you with a feeling of "ahah!"
What has struck me the most, both with Don't Make Me Think! and other readings of late, is the emphasis placed on cognitive energy. This is the general term referring to the amount of mental energy a user must summon up to interact or perform a task on a site. Could you think of a more effective barometer of your design's success? Yes, of course it's common sense to suggest that you want it to be "easy" and "simple" for your users to use your website (or product or whatever), but for some reason, simply bringing it up in such a forward and pseudo-scientific way is quite revealing to me.
His insistance on the need for low cognitive energy was backed by characterizing how people tend to surf the web: by scanning, muddling, and satisficing (as opposed to reading carefully, understanding the whole picture, and choosing our best option or path). "Satisficing" was coined by economist Herbert Simon in Models of Man: Social and Rational (Wiley, 1957).
In fact, his entire approach towards usability reviews is built upon this simple notion of reducing cognitive energy spent to use a site. Let's review Krug's Laws Of Usability:
- 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.
Each of these laws are bountiful mental food for me to chew on. I found his second law, which challenges the standard "two-clicks" rule about content architecture, to even be refreshing and new. I had always considered this wide and shallow approach to information design to be missing the point, and he brought it back into focus. I have been to sites before where my destination within the site was at least 4 or 5 levels deep. But that depth was hardly daunting, because at each click I was both a) confident in my choice, and b) had arrived at that choice within a second of seeing my options. My traverse through the site was mindless, and quite pleasant.
Beyond his steadfast laws of usability, he also pushed other important things to consider when taking care to build a usable site. For one, he stresses the importance of usability testing. I have yet to participate in, lead, or even hear of a real live usability test, but I'm dying to try. Perhaps as this year goes on and I work on my own projects, I can enlist some classmates and friends to be my virtual guinea pigs.
Important to this note is that Krug makes the effort to outline the basic flow and essence of a usability test, including how the interviewer should behave, the types of questions to ask, etc. Very helpful.
The simplicity of this book has made me consider the potential for a master checklist of sorts, in an effort to give me something to run down every time I build--or even conceptualize--a site. This attempt can and should easily be expanded beyond usability. Perhaps a series of checklists, master of master lists, approaching a website from different directions:
- Usability
- Alternative UAs (User Agents)
- Accessibility
- Homepage Elements (to combat Krug's described "one...more...thing" regarding the design of a site's most valuable piece of real estate)
- Interior Elements
- Sections Vs. Utilities (Krug refers to areas of a site such as the shopping cart or information about the company as "utilities," which leaves "sections" to the more important parts that will likely be the main need of a user)
Perhaps I can build these out as the weeks go on. Krug already offers nearly comprehensive lists for a couple of these, and I have some other sources in mind that could help fill the holes. Let's see what I come up with.