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Summary: It Made Me Think
Review: Don't make me think did make me think, but that's a good thing.I've read a number of books on web design, usability etc. Steve's book is one of the most readable and useful treatments of the subject. The book is relatively short and to the point. His approach of mixing in humor and keeping things light make it enjoyable to digest what could be fairly dry information. The sections on testing for usability alone are more than worth the price of the book. I've already made changes to my own site...based on Steve's book, and I don't take lightly to making changes. If you work in web site design (artist, programmer, designer) or just own your own site -- get the book!
Rating: 
Summary: Stating the obvious that is not always so obvious
Review: Sometimes it is the most obvious things that can defeat the most experienced web designer. When it comes to usability you should own this book. Forget the stereotypes of "useable" web sites and forget the horror stories you have heard about how usability will make your site look like Jakob Nielsen's site. "Don't Make Me Think!" is a book for the web designers who want to create a better web site that works for the user and not against them. This book is not intended for the usability expert but is intended for those who wish to better understand how they make a great site more user-friendly.
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Summary: Not for an experienced web designer.
Review: As many reviewers have said so far, this book is great for beginners. I agree. But if you already know most of the "DOs" and "DONTs" of web usability, you will get little more from this book. I highly reccomend "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen as a great read for designers of any ability level. It's an easy read and covers everything, inlcuding just about everything in this book.
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Summary: Very good book for beginners
Review: This is a very good book for somebody who is new in Web usability field. Useful for web developers, designers, project managers and marketing guys. Common sense approach, easy to read, understand and practise. (Much better than "Web pages that suck", which just gives some bad examples of web usability)
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Summary: Made me think a lot!
Review: This book is excellent. Every page worth reading - and then reading again. As someone whose job it is to do usability testing for our company's web site and HTML emails, and do it in little time with even fewer dollars, Steve Krug provides a roadmap to getting the job done. Steve has become my personal god as regards to usability.
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Summary: This book did made me think!
Review: I can't say enough about this book. Great examples and good explanations of the logic behind web usability. We use it every day to evaluate what's good and bad about our sites and where we want them to be. For anyone involved in designing or helping to determine the direction of a web site, it's a must-buy.
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Summary: Classics Illustrated does Web usability
Review: I once took part in a Web design exercise which set the participants a "budget": we sliced up an imaginary heap of money for spending on design activities, all listed on cards. At the end of the exercise, my team had one hundred imaginary dollars unspent. So on a blank card we scribbled a new category - "lunch with the guy who controls the pursestrings" - and assigned the $100 to that. This whimsical touch started heads nodding all around the group. Everyone in the group agreed that creating a usable Web site required real organisational commitment, commitment that could only come from senior management. And most of the designers and design managers around the table that day wanted to build such support. But few knew how to teach their colleagues about the importance of site usability. Enter Steve Krug, with a book you can hand to your collegues and your manager for them to browse overnight, a carefully-crafted little volume that will sell Web site usability painlessly to your colleagues. As a bonus, most usability practitioners will enjoy its stylish condensations themselves. By the standard of current texts like Joann Hackos and Janice Redish's hefty User and Task Analysis for Interface Design or Jakob Nielsen's ubiquitous Designing Web Usability, this book is a carnival midget - eleven large-print chapters, some under 2000 words long, the text broken up by scores of cartoons and other pictures. As Krug himself suggests, he's created the Classics Illustrated version of all those bigger usability texts, the comic-book version that tells you what's in the big books you haven't read. The Classics Illustrated approach starts with the name. Krug titles his book Don't Make Me Think. Like everything that follows it, that title packs maximum effect into minimum space. Krug calls the phrase his First Law of Usability: "When I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory. I should be able to 'get it' - what it is and how to use it - without expending any effort thinking about it." When Krug talks of eliminating effort, he's targeting mental effort that holds up the user for even fractions of seconds. The defining chapter of Don't Make Me Think (available online) argues that site designers work as though users will pore over every detail of their work, when they should expect users to take almost no work at all. In particular: - Users don't read; we scan. - Users don't make optimal choices; we look for the first good-enough solution (a process that economics calls "satisficing"). - Users don't figure out how things work; we muddle through. In other words, designers should think "roadside billboard" rather than "A Suitable Boy". Krug doesn't ruthlessly strip out material the way the billboard analogy implies. Indeed, many of his page designs look almost as cluttered as anyone else's. But the principle holds. If you want your site used, pare everything down to the essentials. Actually, the principle of paring everything back has produced good design for thousands of years. The book itself works because it has slimmed the messages of Web site usability down to an essential core. It makes itself useful to designers by powerfully reinforcing a handful of key ideas that most designers already use. It makes itself useful to the designer's non-designer colleagues by teaching those ideas in a concise but highly engaging style. It is least useful when it tries to dig deeper into issues such as navigation design. Before Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug was a relatively obscure figure in Web site usability. His book suggests a flourishing consultancy practice, and contains endorsements by the likes of information designer Richard Saul Wurman and designer Roger Black. But Krug's most convincing qualification is Don't Make Me Think itself. Like some of the very best Web sites, it lets its audience learn without ever feeling that they've had to make an effort.
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Summary: Good place to start thinking about usability
Review: As a web designer, sometimes I find myself assuming my websites are user freindly. Well, we all know what assuming gets you. Most of the information is common sense. I wish my managers and marketing people would read this book. It would make my life a whole lot easier. Recommended, but I wouldn't stop here. My next book is "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielson
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Summary: A Valuable Book (says author of GUI Bloopers)
Review: As an experienced user-interface designer and author of another UI design book (GUI Bloopers), I expected "Don't Make Me Think" just to confirm things I already knew. In fact, I learned from it. How to reduce the amount of text on a page, for example, and the value of doing so. I immediately used that knowledge to help my wife cut the text on... not a website, but a printed brochure she was creating. Overall, I think this is a valuable book. It's a quick read. The advice in it is sound and well-explained. It will be read by many, many more people than will read most other Web and GUI design books. It will reduce the number of clueless Web-designers, and that is good. My only concern is that many readers of "Don't Make Me Think" may be fooled into believing that this is all there is to it: just read this short book, and you too can be as good a web-designer as Steve Krug. Unfortunately, it ain't so. For example, an easy-to-use e-commerce website requires not just well-designed pages, but also back-end services that were designed in a user-centered way. You can't slap a user-friendly front end onto a back-end that was designed with no thought to users and their tasks. Another example: Krug makes usability testing sound easy, but doesn't warn that: a) the videotape release and non-disclosure forms will have to be run by your lawyers, who will thwart your intent to make it "short and in plain English", and b) paying test-users in cash has IRS implications you may wish to avoid, so it's often better to "pay" in merchandise or gift-certificates.
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Summary: Good guidelines, but too expensive for its contents
Review: This book contains good guidelines on web design, but it's no more than a long article would contain. The author admits in the acknowledgements that it took him 8 months to write this book, which is amazing to me because it is so slim on content. The book strains to fill its 190 pages. The pages are laid out with very little text on each page, and the book is filled with cutesy cartoons and tons of screen shots. The actual content takes up about half of the pages, the rest is full-color graphics. This seems a bit gratuitous to me. The $35 price tag implies a more intense, more fleshed-out book than this. I'd pay about $15 for this information. The other 20 bucks in the price pays for the full color on every page and the expensive paper that the book is printed on. It seems that they would have done well to include more info and less splash. One more thing that you should keep in mind is that the last 50 pages are about how to conduct usability tests. So, the real "meat" of the book is 140 sparsely populated pages. But, this expensive meat is pretty good.
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