“Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug was a very informative and
interesting. It made many important points about developing a website that I
had never thought about before.
The three aspects that I found most useful were the chapters on
designing pages for scanning, omitting words, and usability testing.
The chapter on designing a website is something every aspiring website
publisher and designer should read. This chapter in some ways appealed to my
common sense, but presented these very simple points in a way that made them
meaningful and allowed a new perspective to be formed. There were five tips
presented in this chapter: 1. Present a clear and visual hierarchy, 2. Take
advantage of conventions, 3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas, 4. Make
it obvious what’s clickable, and 5. Minimize noise. There were two of these tips that really stuck out to me.
First, using conventions are necessary. I often do not realize how much I rely
on conventions. I also realized while reading this book that if I was designing
a website the conventions are the things I would leave out. It also was
interesting to me that conventions on websites should not be too unusual or
unique, it is more important that they look like conventions and fulfill the
purpose of such. The second point that stood out to me was that idea of making
clickable links obvious. This struck me as interesting because as a web
designer it is easy to think that by using common sense people will realize
what is and is not clickable. This is not true. I never realized how much
confusion could be created out of a link not being absolutely obvious!
Ultimately, this chapter is a convenient and helpful roadmap to designing the
layout for an almost ideal website.
I also found the website about cutting down on the wording to be very
helpful! I like to talk and I enjoy using very colorful and descriptive
language, I know I would be one of the web designers who put too much
information on a page. I found it
especially interesting that Krug recommended getting rid of instructions. The
instructions are something that most of us see as necessary and in need of
details, but this isn’t so. On page 48 Krug showed an example of how to
effectively cut down the instructions given before a survey was to be taken. He
cut the instructions down from 103 words to 41 words. Amazingly, the shorter
set of instructions that Krug developed were much more effective! I probably
got the best advice from this chapter. On page 45 Krug writes, “Get rid of half
the words on each page, then get rid of what’s left”. I think this is great
information for developing a website and for writing in general as well.
Chapter nine was also very informative and provided great advice for the
future. Chapter nine discusses usability testing. This chapter provides a great
layout for how to test on a budget. Let’s be honest, only big companies have
the ability to test with a professional but the majority of companies in the US
are small sole proprietorships that do not have access to the funds to hire
professional testers. It was also interesting that Krug suggested not putting
as much emphasis on making sure that every participant in the study fit within
a specific target group. I would have bet that the specific user was crucial
but this isn’t so, it is more important to have anyone look at the website. I
also thought the timing of the testing was very important. Krug emphasized that
tests should be ran early and often, instead of running a large test at the end
of design and production. This is often a misconception as end tests are viewed
as the most important test.
Ultimately this book taught me a lot and provided important insights
that I will apply to all of my future web designs.
