Don't make me think

Sep 16th, 2023

book

The complete title of the book is Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Chapter 1

The user shouldn’t have to think when they come to a page. Your task is to remove all question marks that comes in the head when you see a page

Names - Typical culprits are cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names.
Links and buttons that are not obviously clickable

Every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting out attention from the task at hand

And as a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. They enjoy puzzles in their place—when they want to be entertained or diverted or challenged—but not when they’re trying to find out what time their dry cleaner closes. The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious—and easy—can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.

Your goal should be for each page or screen to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user 2 will know what it is and how to use it. In other words, they’ll “get it” without having to think about it.

Chapter 2

FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them. we tend to focus on words and phrases that seem to match (a) the task at hand or (b) our current or ongoing personal interests. And of course, (c) the trigger words that are hardwired into our nervous systems, like “Free,” “Sale,” and “Sex,” and our own name.

FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing. 1 As soon as we find a link that seems like it might lead to what we’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that we’ll click it.

Klein’s team of observers went into their first study (of field commanders at fire scenes) with the generally accepted model of rational decision making: Faced with a problem, a person gathers information, identifies the possible solutions, and chooses the best one. They started with the hypothesis that because of the high stakes and extreme time pressure, fire captains would be able to compare only two options, an assumption they thought was conservative.

As it turned out, the fire commanders didn’t compare any options. They took the first reasonable plan that came to mind and did a quick mental test for possible problems. If they didn’t find any, they had their plan of action.

So why don’t Web users look for the best choice?

We’re usually in a hurry. And as Klein points out, “Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient.”
There’s not much of a penalty for guessing wrong. Unlike firefighting, the penalty for guessing wrong on a Web site is usually only a click or two of the Back button, making satisficing an effective strategy. (Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.)
Weighing options may not improve our chances. On poorly designed sites, putting effort into making the best choice doesn’t really help. You’re usually just as well off going with your first guess and using the Back button if it doesn’t work out.
Guessing is more fun. It’s less work than weighing options, and if you guess right, it’s faster. And it introduces an element of chance—the pleasant possibility of running into something surprising and good

FACT OF LIFE #3: We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.

Why does this happen?

It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring. It’s just not important to us.
If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works—no matter how badly—we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

Chapter 3. Billboard Design 101

DESIGNING FOR SCANNING, NOT READING

Take advantage of conventions
Create effective visual hierarchies
Break pages up into clearly defined areas
Make it obvious what’s clickable
Eliminate distractions
Format content to support scanning

Conventions are your friends In the past twenty years, many conventions for Web pages have evolved. As users, we’ve come to have a lot of expectations about

Where things will be located on a page. For example, users expect the logo identifying the site to be in the top-left corner (at least in countries where reading is left-to-right) and the primary navigation to be across the top or down the left side.
How things work. For example, almost all sites that sell products use the metaphor of a shopping cart and a very similar series of forms for specifying things like your method of payment, your shipping address, and so on.
How things look. Many elements have a standardized appearance, like the icon that tells you it’s a link to a video, the search icon, and the social networking sharing options.

One problem with conventions, though: Designers are often reluctant to take advantage of them. Faced with the prospect of following a convention, there’s a great temptation for designers to try reinventing the wheel instead, largely because they feel (not incorrectly) that they’ve been hired to do something new and different, not the same old thing

My recommendation: Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.

Create effective visual hierarchies

The more important something is, the more prominent it is. The most important elements are either larger, bolder, in a distinctive color, set off by more white space, or nearer the top of the page—or some combination of the above.
Things that are related logically are related visually. For instance, you can show that things are similar by grouping them together under a heading, displaying them in the same visual style, or putting them all in a clearly defined area.
Things are “nested” visually to show what’s part of what. For instance, a site section name (“Computer Books”) would appear above the titles of the individual books, reflecting the fact that the books are part of the section. And each book title in turn would span all the elements that make up the description of that book.

Chapter 4

In general, I think it’s safe to say that users don’t mind a lot of clicks as long as each click is painless and they have continued confidence that they’re on the right track

Which one was me? I had to think about it, and even when I made my choice I wasn’t very confident it was the right one. In fact, what I had to look forward to when the target page finally loaded was even more thinking to figure out whether I was in the right place.

Don’t make the user make a tough choice, they are not sure of.

Chapter 5

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

A product should contain no extra feature or customization than necessary

It reduces the noise level of the page.
It makes the useful content more prominent.
It makes the pages shorter, allowing users to see more of each page at a glance without scrolling.

Happy talk must die We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is or to tell us what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to explaining what makes us great.

Instructions must die Another major source of needless words is instructions. The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users finding the information they need are pretty low.