Steve Krug

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Title

Biography

Steve Krug is an American usability consultant and writer, principal of Advanced Common Sense, a one-man consultancy based near Boston. He took a degree in English at Brown University, worked at Apple and elsewhere before setting up on his own in 1991, and has consulted for organisations including Apple, Bloomberg, NPR, the International Monetary Fund and Lexus. He is best known for two short books that made usability testing accessible to people who are not usability professionals.

Don't Make Me Think

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (New Riders, 2000; 2nd edition 2006; Don't Make Me Think, Revisited, 3rd edition 2014) is among the best-selling books on web design ever published, and unusual in that it is short — roughly 200 generously illustrated pages, deliberately readable in a single sitting.

Its title is Krug's first law of usability, and the book's whole argument follows from it. Every time a user has to stop and work out what something is, or where to click, or whether a word is a link, a small amount of goodwill is spent. Enough of these and the user leaves. The designer's job is to remove questions, not to reward effort.

Key Ideas

• People scan, they don't read. Users do not work through a page methodically. They glance, look for something roughly resembling what they want, and click the first plausible candidate. Krug's illustration — a billboard going past at 60 miles an hour — is the standard shorthand.
• Satisficing. Borrowing Herbert Simon's term, Krug argues that users do not choose the best option; they choose the first adequate one. Designs that assume rational comparison across options are designing for a person who does not exist.
• Nobody reads the instructions. Explanatory text is the fallback of a design that has failed. "Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left."
• Conventions are a resource, not a constraint. Novel navigation costs the user learning they did not agree to spend. Innovate where it produces value, and conform everywhere else.
• The trunk test. Drop a user on any page of a site; they should be able to say what site it is, what page they are on, what the major sections are, and what their options are here.
• Usability testing is cheap. Krug's most consequential practical claim, elaborated in Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2010): testing three users for a morning each month, informally, catches most of what an expensive formal study would, and — crucially — is achievable often enough to actually change anything. "Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none."

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Krug describes the mechanism behind frictional interfaces from the inside: friction is not an abstract property of a design but a running tally of small unnecessary questions, paid for out of a finite reserve of the user's patience. His work is also a rare case of a design methodology explicitly built around the observation that people are not the rational, attentive, instruction-reading subjects that most systems are designed for — which is an anthropological finding as much as a practical one.

Selected Works

• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2000; 2nd ed. 2006)
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (2010)
• Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (2014)

Related Reading

• Frictional Interface
• Calm Technology
• Designing Interactions
• Edward Tufte

External Links

• Advanced Common Sense