Review - Don't Make Me Think (by Steve Krug)

At the beginning of twenty first century Steve Krug, the guru of usability, published his much praised book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. After half a decade he did it again by releasing an improved version of his enlightening creation.

In his book Steve Krug focuses on a very important yet sometimes disregarded aspect of human computer interaction – usability. Web usability is something that every person who wants to call oneself web developer has to know about. It’s the most essential component of making a web page presentable and its usage bearable to the user. That’s where the title – Don’t Make Me Think – comes in and explains the most important message of the book: an average web user doesn’t like to think, one doesn’t have the time to carefully ponder over every decision he or she has to make when wandering through the maze of different web pages. All the decisions regarding choosing between the links, buttons or other web page elements must be made unconsciously.
Keeping that main idea in mind the author describes some important points of how users really use the web and how can developers use that knowledge to create more appealing and easier to use web sites specifically for these users. As described in the book, users don’t read all the information on web pages nor carefully familiarize themselves with all the elements of the page – they just scan the page. As mentioned before, most of the web users don’t have time or patience or need to absorb all that information laid down for them, so they’re doing the best to find only these exact bits of information that they currently need. And all web developers should keep that in mind – they should make the scanning process easy for the users.

The best thing about this book is that the author knows exactly what he is talking about. The whole book follows the exact same rules that Steve Krug finds so important about web usability. The book is written in simple language without using needless words nor overcomplicating anything, the author uses illustrative drawings and screencaptures to illustrate the points he wants to make and a slight humor as the final touch. All that makes the book very enjoyable and easy to read, and what’s most important, the core ideas of the book are clearly laid out and made easily comprehensible for the reader. The result is not just a book about web usability, it’s a very well written handbook that brings out the obvious, that teaches people everything that is forgotten when dealing with more complex aspects of web design. And a very good example of implementing all those ideas is this book itself.

For me the book was like a wake up call – it introduces the very basic points about usability, the points that are so simple and well known that every average person knows them already. Or do they? Usually when people strive for something more complex and refined the most basic ideas are forgotten. Sometimes someone tries to reinvent the wheel, the other times everything is just done as it turns out. That’s why it’s good, if there is someone who reminds us once in a while how things are really done around here.
I as a programmer always look things at the implementation side. When designing in my head some web page or other piece of software I always think about the internal structures first and then begin to build everything around them. The user interface and everything related to it comes always last, for me it’s like an extension for the internal structures that is formed later in the process in a form that other mechanisms allow it. But now, thanks to this book, I am able to see things from the other angle again. And I have to say, that the other angle may sometimes be the better angle.

Risto Seene