Book Review: "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug.

I've never been a person who was able to appreciate/create visual experiences. Choosing or deciding colour when building a website is a nightmare. I'm just not a visually creative person.

I want to see if I can change that in 2022. While purists disagree, I believe that creativity, like any other skill, can be learnt to a greater extent than people think.

The design pursuit.

As I begin my journey to understand what "good" design is, I want to keep it close to my profession. I'm a software engineer who works mostly on the frontend. While design is not something that I'm expected to be an expert at, it makes the conversation easy if I know what the designers are trying to do.

I started where every 21st century techie would. The Youtube.

I watched a lot of videos and wasn't getting anywhere. Almost all the videos talk about Colour, Typography and Layout. It was great information. And that was the problem. It was information. There was no method to this madness.

So I did what I do every time I try to learn something new and get stuck. Start at the beginning. (at least go back few years). I wanted to see how web design evolved since the beginning of the internet. Every form of media that I've consumed in this pursuit, took me to few classics in web design.

One of those classics is "Don't Make Me Think. Revisited" by Steve Krug.

My thoughts

Empathy

"Empathy is virtually a professional requirement for usability work" - Steve Krug. This book is empathetic to it's readers. It doesn't assume. Everything is explained with real examples that I'm sure almost all of us have experienced.

Not a framework

This book does not give you rules that you can follow to create a "great" product. It gives enough explanation and examples to help you understand that "it depends" is almost always the right answer when designing a website. Not to worry, there are plenty of scenarios to understand what it "depends on".

Common Sense

A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Usability. is the book's tag line. "Oh yeah! I know that." is a recurring feeling when reading the book. However, like Steve points out, "it's not necessarily obvious until after someone's pointed it out to you.". While everything felt obvious, I don't think I would've been able to consciously recognise it, let alone get my thoughts in order enough to be productive with it.

Think like an average web user

As someone who develops websites for a living, it was a surprise to me that the users care very little about a lot of things. It was also surprising that I care very little about a lot of things (as a user) that I considered are important (as a designer).

I've realised that bridging the gap between how you consume and how you create is essential to building great products. I always ask myself "As a user, do I like this design?". That's an easy question to answer. The more important and difficult question is "As a creator, how can I make something I would use?". While it might sound subjective, a significant chunk of it is not. Most of us are "average web users". A lot of our liking depends on usability. This book answers that difficult question.

Structured Learning

One thing that is a problem for someone trying to learn a new skill, is that a lot of the scattered videos we consume lack structure. It's important for the learning process to clearly layout the basics and build on top of them. This book divides the learning process into 4 distinguishable parts.

• Guiding Principles - This section talks about the very basics about designing a website for usability. It goes into how users consume and navigate websites, and draws comparisons to real life "non-website" things like navigating supermarket aisles. These comparisons are extremely important as it helps us understand our behavior outside a specific context (like websites) and shows us that it's not very different to how we consume this specific context (websites).
• Things you need to get right - This section talks about the actual web elements and how to get them right. It sets you up for success even in scenarios different than what are given as examples in the book, by letting you in on the thought process. This is where you learn how to use your common sense.
• Making sure you got them right - I have immense respect for this section of the book. A lot of resources tell you how to do a specific thing. Very few talk about how would you test it to make sure you got it right.
• Larger concerns and outside influences - This book's original edition was published in 2000. While all the principles and methods are still relevant, there are additional things that came into play later on, like developing for mobile and accessibility. This section shows how the principles are relevant even to mobile and goes on to great lengths about the importance of accessibility. It also talks about how to engage your workplace in usability and accessibility discussions. At the end of the day, unless you call all the shots at your workplace, it's important for you to engage the ones who do.

What next?

One thing that makes any learning resource valuable is helping people understand how to extend this learning experience. This book has tons of web resources and book references in case you want to dive deep into any of the topics covered.

So should you read it?

While I'm tempted to answer it with "It depends", it's not true. Everyone, regardless of their position on the learning ladder, should read this book. At the very least, it will help you organize your thoughts and make them actionable.