Response to "Don't Make Me Think!" by Steve Krug
This definitely is not the first time I've read this book. I've probably read it at least 3 times by now since I first found it in my high school sophomore year. At that time, I was only making websites as a hobby and hadn't considered it as something I could potentially make a career out of. One of the things I love about the book is that Krug also practices what he preaches. The book is easily scannable, easily readable (using concise vernacular), and is a very unintimidating read.
The concepts that Krug talks about (in these chapters, 1-3) are timeless ideas. I think that the most important chapter in this set is the second one, describing how people don't follow any optimal path the designer has set for them. User behavior is the thing you absolutely cannot control in an environment that developers are used to being able to fine tune. Even if everything is 'technically' correct, if you don't keep in mind and attempt to plan for real user behavior, you won't have a site that is truly optimized.
The concepts that Krug talks about (in these chapters, 1-3) are timeless ideas. I think that the most important chapter in this set is the second one, describing how people don't follow any optimal path the designer has set for them. User behavior is the thing you absolutely cannot control in an environment that developers are used to being able to fine tune. Even if everything is 'technically' correct, if you don't keep in mind and attempt to plan for real user behavior, you won't have a site that is truly optimized.
I agree with you that the user behavior is a completely unpredictable variable. It's like when the author mocks about the profile of the average user: "kept in a hermetically sealed vault at the International Bureau of Standards in Geneva".
ReplyDeleteAs a designer, we can only do our best to ease the life of the people online and expect that they have a smooth navigation. It's like the author said in the "fact of life" section of chapter 2, We don't figure out how things work. We muddle through; guessing how a website works sometimes can be fun because its effortless and brings the element of surprise into the experience.