Don't Make Me Think

The promise

Nobody files a complaint because a screen was confusing. What people actually do is quieter and far more expensive: they leave, they call the front desk, they text a coworker asking "do you know how this thing works?", or they push the whole task to next month. Confusion is the one product defect that never reaches a report. Nothing crashes, nothing throws an error, there's no incident to log. On the other side of the screen, somebody simply decided it wasn't worth it.

Steve Krug wrote about this when the web was still viewed on CRT monitors, and his argument aged better than almost anything else from that era — because the problem was never technical: we design for an attentive reader who doesn't exist. What follows isn't a walk through the book's chapters, and it isn't full coverage either: of its nine core ideas we work six, three are left out entirely, and not one of the six that stayed is here in full. They're arranged along an axis of our own, doubt as a unit of cost: how you detect it, where it gets manufactured, what it's worth, and what happens when somebody manufactures it on purpose.

The idea in one image

You're in someone else's kitchen and they've asked you to grab the glasses. In your own kitchen this isn't a task at all: your hand goes to the right door while you keep talking. Here you open the first cabinet and find plates. The second, lids with no containers. The third one sticks. On the fourth try the glasses turn up above the sink, where it would never have occurred to you to look. You walk out with them and with a small irritation you couldn't explain.