I own this book and took these notes to further my own learning. Taking notes, publishing them and re-reading them allow me to flatten my forgetting curve. If you enjoy these notes, I highly encourage you to do the same, buy this book here and take your own notes.
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug
- Usability principle: if something will require a large investment of time, or looks like it will, it's less likely to be used
- A first and most important law of usability is: Don't make me think
- Make sure that all your button looks like clickable
- One interesting skill is to notice everything that makes you think on web and build-up your UX knowledge
- 1st fact: we never read a page, we scan it. We spot words/phrases that catch our eyes and we create our own understanding. Why? We are in a hurry, we know that we don't need to read everything
- 2nd: we don't make the optimal choice, we just satisfice. We usually don't choose the best option, we choose the first reasonable one. Why? Optimizing is too time-consuming, satisficing on the long term is more efficient, no real penalty of guessing wrong, guessing wrong is more fun
- 3rd: we don't figure out how things work, we muddle through. Faced with new technology, users usually don't look to the instructions, they go through and made their own understanding. If it works, we stick to it
- What should we do then? Create visual hierarchy on each page, use conventions, break a page up into clearly define the area, make obvious what is clickable, minimize noise
- Three mindless, unambiguous clicks = one click that require thought
- Making choices mindless is key
- Omit needless words and get rid of unnecessary happy talk, be straightforward
- Search dominant users will always search for a search box when they enter a site, the search bar should be available in each page
- Users that don't find what they are looking for will leave your website
- Back button account for 30 to 40 % of all web clicks, HP is always the north star, it allows users to do a refreshing start
- Every page should have a name like every street corner should have a street sign
- Tabs is very powerful, don’t forget to have one tab selected when entering the web
- Be careful with color-coding because 1/200 women and 1/12 men - particularly over the age of 40 can't detect some colors distinctions - color should never be the only cue
- A well-designed page can pass with flying colors the trunk test: that's to say being able to answers without a doubt these questions: what site is this? What page am I on? What are the major sections of this site? What are my options at this level ? Where am I in the scheme of things? How can I search?
- HP should give an overview of content and features, what can I find here? What can I do here? At the very beginning, the HP should clearly show what this site is and what it's for and if possible why the user should be here and not at some other site. HP should establish credibility and trust + showing where to start easily
- Add a good tagline to your site, even Amazon had one for years: “Books, Music & more”
- Sometimes the fact that users may try to click on something not clickable could be a small price to pay if the design makes the concept clear
- A good homepage tell me what is the site and where to start
- Ask the right question in design: don't ask: “do most people like the pulldown menu?", but “Does this pulldown menu, with these items and this wording in this context on this page provide a great experience for most people who are likely to use this site
- Test on a user, testing always work and will make you notice something that did not think about because you become used to it
- Test earlier instead of testing after
- Testing is an iterative process, 3 to 4 for each round is a good number
- Instead of writing reports at the end, do a video call, reports the finding and directly agree on the most important problems to fix
- During the interview, be patient, calm, empathic, a good listener and inherently fair
- Typical problems after interviews? Users are unclear on the concept, the words they'are looking for are not there, there is too much going on (overall noise)
- ignore “kayak problems”, users don’t need to get it right the first time. No harm no foul, it's also part of the fun to get back on track almost immediately. Take ‘new features’ with a grain of salts
- Focus on the low-hanging fruit. That's to say the big and cheap wins
- PopUp is always annoying but if it increases revenue by 10%, it worths keeping it, it’s a business call
- The FAQ is super important and requires special research
- Make your site ADA compliant because it's the right thing to do. Great resources for this: “guidelines for accessible and usable website: observing users who work with screen readers”, “building an accessible website ' by Joe Clark, “maximum accessibility: making your web site more usable for everyone” by John Slatin and Sharron Rush. Create a skip to main content link at the beginning of each page
- Good resources: homepage usability %0 websites deconstructed by J Nielsen + the design of everyday thing + a practical guide to usability testing