Updated: February 3, 2011
And for the final part of our book review on Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug addresses a few other concerns you’re likely to encounter when designing your website. He details the ‘common courtesy’ of having a usable website and the concepts of goodwill – ways you can boost goodwill as well as ways it can get destroyed.
He also outlines other issues to like accessibility for people with disabilities and the importance of including elements in your page to help ALL visitors, not just the perfect ones you’ve identified through market research. The final chapter quickly discusses ways to convince your boss of the validity of your recommendations. Some bosses and executives may have a difficult time understanding the virtue of good web usability. Krug gives some great examples for you to consider.
If you haven’t seen them yet, read parts I and II of our book review to fully understand the intricacies of web usability.
Section IV – Larger Concerns and Outside Influences
Chapter 10: “Usability as common courtesy – Why your Web site should be a mensch”
Besides building clarity into your website, you also need to be considerate of your users as well. Is your site clear? Does it behave badly and erode goodwill among users?
Consider this:
You’re booked on a flight but a pilots’ strike begins two days before you’re scheduled to leave. You go to the airline’s website to find information about the strike. After searching for awhile you give up amid frustration. Undoubtedly, this erodes much goodwill you had toward the airline.
Users in fact, including you, have a reservoir of goodwill. You begin very optimistic and eager to find what you’re looking for. Not
everyone’s reservoir is the same…some people have a shorter fuse than others. And this also depends on the situation. Your goodwill will drain away quicker if you’re in a hurry.
Fortunately, goodwill is refillable so if the site makes some mistakes but makes up for it, the user will leave in a good mood and more likely to return.
Here are some things that erode goodwill:
1. Hiding information people are looking for
2. Punishing users for not doing things your way
3. Asking for information you don’t really need
4. Shucking and jiving users
5. Putting too much ‘sizzle’ (i.e. Flash intro) in the way
6. Site looks amateurish
And some things that increase goodwill:
1. Knowing what your visitors are looking for and making it obvious and easy
2. Telling your visitors what they want to know
3. Saving steps
4. Putting effort into your site
5. Making it easy to recover from errors
6. Providing creature comforts like printer-friendly pages
Doing things like this and more to increase goodwill is not only courteous, but good business practice. If people coming to your site have an easy time and enjoy themselves, they’ll be more likely to return and tell their friends.
Chapter 11: “Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheet, and you”
Unless you decide all of your users are perfect in every way, you’re going to need to think about accessibility. Adding features into your site for disabled persons is not only good business, it’s the law.
Specifically, the law is what’s known as Section 508 of the 1988 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act, which specifies information technology accessibility standards for companies wanting to do business with the U.S. Government.
When discussing accessibility, designers and developers naturally get a little anxious since it potentially means more work for them. Making a site accessible is definitely harder than it should be, but well worth it from both a legal and business standpoint.
To understand how to make your site accessible, there are several articles and books you can read like Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark and Constructing Accessible Websites by Jim Thatcher and others.
Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is one thing you can do to make an accessible website. In the beginning of the Internet, everything was text. Designers and developers didn’t have much control over layout so they began using tables.
CSS sheets give you much more control over formatting, consistency among browsers and other benefits. CSS sheets also allow you to make specific changes in your site’s HTML code to make it more accessible.
Chapter 12: “Help! My boss wants me to_______”
There will be times your boss will want you to do things that are not good from a usability standpoint.
Maybe they’ll want the site to ask users for more personal information than you need. Or maybe they want more ‘pizazz’ to the site – things like splash pages, animation and music.
Steve provides some great examples of letter he’s written to CEOs and other executives warning them about the dangers of doing these things and others.
Well that brings us to the conclusion of Don’t Make Me Think. It’s a very interesting read and easy too – if you’ve got about 4-6 spare hours (…whew, who does?), you can easily read it in one sitting. If not, put it down and easily pick up right where you left off.
To conclude, all of the tips or ‘rules’ outlined here and detailed more in the book are not iron clad. There are certain situations – or interfaces – where doing something contrary to what’s in the book or on here is okay. If your site for instance is designed to make people think, puzzle or challenge them, then by all means do what you got to do.
You can buy Don’t Make Me Think on Amazon for a great price. I certainly recommend it if you want to learn more about a core issue
to being successful online.
Let us know if you’ve picked up a copy and your thoughts…we’ll provide further updates into the year.
Until next time…