Don’t Make Me Think PLEASE!

The next chapters of “Don’t Make Me Think” really deal with how to organize information on a website, how to convey information to users, omitting unnecessary information, and how to guide the user.  All of these things may seem so obvious when talking about good design but, at a glance may not be.  In chapter 3 Krug compares web surfing with looking at billboards while driving which I think is dead on.

If web surfing is like passing billboards at 70 miles an hour, how do you make them effective.  One thing is by relating the importance of things visually.  By making the important things larger on the page, grouping things visually that are grouped logically, and nesting information the designer can create a visual hierarchy.  This hierarchy will allow users to visually disect the quicker, which is the goal for billboards.  A designer can also take advantage of conventions, or common design elements, the user will automatically recognize certain aspects of the page.  A common web convention is that the site logo will also be a link to the homepage so if a designer does this the user will already know what to do without THINKING!  Conventions are useful for automatic recognition but for things not so common we can separate the page into different sections.  This will allow a user to get to where they are going a lot faster because its more obvious what area/section has what. Going one step further, if the designer makes the things that are clickable more obvious it will also help to help the decision making to a minimum.  Once we have things organized for the user we can also try to cut the noise out of the page.  Noise would be anything that is distracting for the user, such as loud backgrounds or obnoxious animated gifs.  These things take the users attention away from task at hand and cause them to have to refocus.  The overall idea of this chapter is that the designer should attempt to make things more obvious and less distracting.

In Chapter 4 the focus is how to make things more obvious.  Krug likens this to playing the childhood game of animal vegetable or mineral, which I somewhat agree with.  To me its more like paper, rock, scissors, the user is going to make split decisions and hope they are the ones that beat the site.  However just like paper, rock, scissors the user will only go 3 out of 5.  Its important then that we design the sites to show our hand if you will.  The user should not have to guess or interpret the information on the page and content should be obvious to everyone.  One way to make content easy and obvious to everyone is to get rid of everything that is unnecessary.

Omitting the needless words on a website we can reduce noise and get to the point for the user.  When I first read chapter 5 my initial question was, what is needless?  After reading I realized that this meant that just about everything was needless.  Some of the reasons we want to do this as designers is that it reduces noise on the page, makes useful content more prominent, and makes pages short and easier to scan the page.  All of these things make it much easier to get what your looking for when you are going 70 on the super highway (does anyone say that anymore?)  There are also some useful tips for what to get rid of in this chapter.  The first suggestion is not cut out the flowery happy talk that we never read on websites.  Second is to cut out all those useless instructions that no one ever reads or uses.  All of these things can make content more understandable, but what if its not what we are looking for?

That feeling of being oh so close, we have all had it right!  So what do you do if you haven’t clicked just right or the information is not what is expected?  Chapter 6 introduces the concept of breadcrumbs.  This is the idea that a website should feel somewhat like physical space, but a very large physical space.  The reason for this, is that when we browse we are almost always looking for something.  This fact makes it useful for designers to add not only an indication of where we are in the site but also a search box.  The search box will allow search dominant users to look for things quickly and efficiently. One of the main aspect of breadcrumbs is persistent navigation.  Persistent navigation is consistent throughout the site and is useful to the user in several ways.  Its will act as an anchor for the user, it tells us whats in site and how to use that information, and it also gives us confidence in the people who created the site.  This navigation should be the same on every section of the sight except the homepage, where the site logo should be more prominent, and on form pages.  There should also be separation in links to the sections of the website and the utilities, such as FAQ’s.  Just having a clear well thought navigation system can make or break a site for me, and many users, this is why we Krug devotes so much time to the subject.

Each subject in “Don’t Make Me think” is very important in web design.  The beauty of these chapters and the entire book is the relationship between the simplicity of good design, and Krug’s explanations.  Its almost as if one reiterates the other…