Book Review: Don't Make Me Think
Understanding the Basics of Designing and Testing Usable Websites
Feb 17, 2008
Any who has a website for their business knows the key to their site's success is bringing their target audience(s) back time after time and converting many of these visits into sales (if it's an ecommerce site). What's the key to keeping your customers satisfied and coming back? Designing a site that is "usable". For those who can't afford to pay out a lot of money for usability experts, here's a must-have book for you: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.
There's a great line in the Forward of this book by Roger Black that sets the tone for understanding the importance of usability design and testing: "...80 percent of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning." (Don't Make Me Think, page ix)
The reality is, though, that many small to medium sized businesses cannot afford to pay the big bucks for usability experts. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do usability design and testing - it just means you have to find a way to do it yourself. This book will help you learn to do it yourself.
It's not a huge book. At 185 reading pages, it has lots of examples so the actual amount of writing is not great. According to Krug in his Introduction, it's written this way on purpose. No one has time to read a long book on usability, nor do they need to know everything there is to know.
The book is broken down into 3 main sections:
- Guiding Principles
- Things You Need to Get Right
- Making Sure You Got Them Right
Guiding Principles
The 5 chapters in this section outline the basic principles of good website design, what Rug calls the laws of usability. His First Law of Usability: Don't Make Me Think, is about designing a web page or web site whose purpose is obvious or self-evident. If a visitor has to think about it what's happening or what's being sold, they aren't likely to stick around long. The others principles include understanding how users really the web and the best approach to designing web pages. The section ends with a chapter on writing (or not writing) for the web.
Things You Need To Get Right
The 2 chapters in this section are related to critical components of your web site that you can't do wrong. These include Navigation and the Home Page. These are the longest chapters in the book because Rug believes they are the most challenging aspects to usable websites.
Making Sure You Got Them Right
It's not enough to learn how to design usable websites, you need to learn how to find out if you did the right thing. You cannot be judge and jury of your web site, your users are. From understanding that your development team cannot and should not make usability decisions to types of testing you can do on shoe-string budget, to how you can do it yourself, there's lots of good advice on usability testing for the non-experienced person.
This book is a great read for those of you in the trenches trying to build and maintain websites that make your customers happy. Whether you are a developer, designer, marketer, webmaster, project manager or owner you can learn to design and build usable web sites. Buy this book, read it and then start to put some of the ideas in place.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something right by learning from our mistakes. Remember, you aren't a usability expert, but you do want a great website. You may be surprised at how well you make out.
