Summary on “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug

Posted: August 27th, 2021

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Summary on “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug

The author of the book highlights about the importance of building a uniquely different website that embedded on the approach of comprehending human psychology, aside from focusing entirely on technological design. In this regard, Krug underscores a series of principles and instructions that guide a web designer while creating a usable web. The main intent of the writer is to reinforce clear and succinct comprehension among the users of a web. In other words, these important elements for designing a usable web are intended to reshape the behaviors of uses while navigating the sites. Therefore, the book, “Don’t Make Me Think” equips its readership with easily applied insights relevant for improving the usability of users based on their psychology.

Three Laws of Usability

Fundamentally, the book provides its readership with three sets of laws that regulate website usability. In simpler terms, the book considers something to be usable when an average individual can easily contemplate about the desired results, without having to action thinking. Therefore, Krug categorically enlists the following laws as follow. The first law on designing a much usable web is “do not make me think”. From Krug’s point of view, this is the principal rule since it intends to discourage designers from creating webs, which require users to take time to think before attempting an action. The reason is that many users get distracted whenever they pause for split-seconds. Of course, this rule is helpful in equipping designers with the rationality to create effortless and self-explanatory webs. Particularly, a web is regarded as self-evident when its users “get” insights about the clickable links and custom of obvious words. The second law is about “Making every click an obvious choice with no need to think”. According to Krug, the number of clicks in a website does not matter so long as the user does not invoke thinking while touching the clicks. Nonetheless, the writer only considers the possibility of having non-mindless and unobvious clicks during slow Internet connectivity. The third law, “half the words on each page, and half them further” seeks to equip designers with the human psychology associated with cutting down unnecessary distractions in web content. Undoutedly, this rule makes sense whenever key contents of a web stand out as short and precise.

Designing Usable Websites

Further, Krug mention ways that one would apply to design much usable websites. He provides instructions that a majority of web users do not read websites sequentially. Rather, they scan web pages. Also, they do not make optimal choices, but instead action reasonable preferences. Indubitably, the author states that users would opt for guesswork at the expense of making the right attitudes. Apart from that, the author argues in favor of executing usability testing as measure of checking the human psychology of users while on the page, and further identifying possible errors.

In summary, Krug advises web designers to implement easy scanning techniques by use of prevailing conventions, operative visual hierarchies, formatting content, and additionally make each click mindless as well as obvious. Likewise, the book recommends the need ofstriking out plausible distractions that tend to hinder easy scanning and navigation among the users. Therefore, the book summarizes that the three laws on the web usability need to be combined in a bid to make pages more obvious and mindless, thus impacting positively on the human psychology of users.

Works Cited

Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. 2^nd ed., New Riders, 2014.