Week 2 Reading Response

Chapters 3, 4, 5: “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug

I enjoy reading this book – it’s so short and concise. I wish all my courses had books like this one!

Chapter 3 list five important things to make sure a user sees when “whizzing by”:

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy: the content on the page should clearly show relationships. A good visual hierarchy saves the user processing time by organizing and prioritizing. Pages should have three traits:
   Prominence: if it’s more important – make it more prominent by using size, bold or color.
   Grouping: If they’re related, group them together. Display it under a headline, use the same style, or put them in a defined area.
   Nesting: sectioning content, one under the other to show this is a grouped category.
2. Conventions: embrace conventions. A clear example was given with the newspaper analogy: without ever being taught, we can read a newspaper. The convention of scanning and finding headings, captions and photo credits comes easily and it’s universal - it breeds familiarity. It you’re reinventing the wheel make sure it is clear and self-explanatory or adds value.
3. Break up Pages: allows users to decide quickly which to use and which to ignore. I liked the $25,000 Pyramid examples: “Things I can do on this site;” “Links to today’s top stories;” “Products this company sells;” “Things they’re eager to sell me;” “Navigation to the rest of the site.”
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable: don’t squander “the limited reservoir of patience and goodwill that each user brings to a new site.” Make links obvious and avoid making other content look like links (through the use of color, size, underline, etc.).
5. Keep the noise down: don’t have background images competing for attention; avoid using lots of things going on at the same time.

Chapter 4 was very short but noteworthy. It focused on the number of clicks to use on a website. The author recommends not focusing on “how many” clicks but instead think “how hard is it?” Is the user on the right scent when he/she navigates through the web site? Think in terms of two types of hierarchies:
• Wider Site = more categories, fewer levels, fewer clicks
• Deep Site = more levels, more clicks, fewer options at each level

Chapter 5’s “Omit Needless Words” struck a chord with me. I worked at an in-house graphic department for a library. The librarians loved words and our department’s goal was to reduce the text for print and web. Get rid of half and then half again. Be ruthless. It’s necessary for so many reasons: reduces noise, makes useful content more prominent, and makes for shorter pages.

“Happy talk and instructions must die” was an “aha” moment for me. For another class project I’m creating a web site for a non-profit group that uses “Happy talk” – introduction text that conveys no useful information. The mission statement is important but doesn’t need to be prominent on the “Home” page. Pointing out what makes them viable to the community would be more useful and interesting. Eliminate instructions, everything should be self-explanatory – if only the majority of web sites followed this convention, there would be far less aggravated users in the world!