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Summary: See your own website design as a "first time viewer"
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How can a designer or design team truly step back and look at their own website as someone seeing it for the first time?
Yes, we may think we do -- but Steve Krug's powerful and effective concept of visualizing people's "thought balloons" as they look over your site and its navigation will change your perspective forever! Using many actual website examples, Krug and his cartoons open your mind to a clear and fundamental look at usability issues. He also skewers the personality issues on the client and developer's side that can adversely affect site building.
Yet always beneath the humor is a solid foundation of concise, well grounded, and practical design principles -- among them: Five questions your home page must answer for a new viewer; Six elements ALL your pages should have; and importantly, when and how to do usability testing (on a budget, no less).
Common sense never seemed so sensible before! Among my many web design books, this one is on the top of the stack.
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Summary: A small gem of a book for anyone doing Web development
Review: My new favorite book on Web usability design and user testing. This is a short book (I like books that get to the point without a lot of padding!) that promotes some real commonsense design principles and cuts through much of the nonsense that passes for site design today. It also has a great couple of chapters on usability testing that demystifies the process and makes it accessible to anyone doing Web work.
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Summary: Great read for the whole development team
Review: I read J. Neilson's book on usability and valued his writings but Krug's book is my favorite. The pithy, often humerous writing style, the exceedingly 'usable' design of the book, and his sage advice make it a great addition to your library. It's short enough that every member of your web development team will find time to read it, and benefit from it.
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Summary: Easy Read and On Target!
Review: Great book! The clarity and layout of this book, is in itself a study in concise information delivery. Of course, to do anything less would understate the title of the book. It is truly advice that is common sense in an environment that tends to skew towards the complicated. It's nice to know that "Keeping It Simple" has enduring value.
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Summary: A eye-opener of a book.
Review: Aside from being a beautifully designed book that is well written and chock full of insight about how people react to websites (and life in general)... this book is a marvel. There are examples of websites that just make it hard for people to get the information they need -- and specific ways to fix these problems. And on top of all the great info is a detailed guide to performing your own usability study without spending thousands of dollars. This book is an eye-opener, and will give any website designer a distinct advantage over the competition.
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Summary: Absolutely Loved This Book!
Review: I'm not a technical person and I found this book insightful, packed with useful information, incredibly well-written and thoroughly enjoyable. I was able to get a really good feel for the rationale and practice of usability testing. And I appreciated the "heads up" on other books to further my understanding. I was also truly impressed with the way Steve Krug demonstrates an uncommon respect for both the general public and web designers alike. And the design of the book is just gorgeous!
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Summary: A human approach to computers
Review: There's a good Dilbert cartoon which categorises bosses into various types, one being the 'over promoted' who compensates for his lack of technical understanding with the use of complicated jargon and management doublespeak. Lots of books about the internet and computers read like this, as if they're written by people who are afraid to communicate ideas in simple terms because they fear it will expose their fragile knowledge base.Thankfully, in Don't Make me Think, Steve Krug has renounced the temptation to shove in complicated words and tecchie details, and consequently has created a book for normal human beings. That doesn't mean it is dumbed-down - not in the least. It surely takes more skill to present information in a pure and simple format that it does to blind the reader with science. An alternative title could have been The Emperor's New Clothes, because Krug has exposed the myths behind usability and called it for what it really is, just plan, straightforward Common Sense. Don't read this book if you want to learn about complicated system architecture and networks. Do read it if you want to learn what people do on Web sites. The beauty is, you probably already know what's in the book if you have ever used the Web at all. But what Krug is able to do is make you see and interpret what you know and turn it into practical improvements. A must buy book for Web developers.
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Summary: You'll thank yourself for buying this book
Review: I LOVED this book! I've already read around twenty of the best-selling usability books, but this one is the most usable of them all. The book is filled with observations that are pithy, keenly insightful, and most eminently useful. Krug doesn't make you wade through extra text to get to the "good stuff." In fact, the book is virtually pure "good stuff." Krug's sense of humor is refreshing and never intrusive, and the clean graphics demonstrate precisely what he's written. If you're at all interested in usability, you'll thank yourself for buying this book.
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Summary: This book earns its credible reviews
Review: As a web designer that owns my own domain, I had purchased Jakob Nielsens Wed Design Usability book and loved it. I thought nothing could top it, but then I was in a book store and picked Don't Make Me Think up. It had some high-power reviews of the book on that back cover. When I opened this book up, I understood why. This book talks about Web Design as and ways to understand why a site needs to be design to the specific user the designer has in mind. Highly respect design expert Roger Black writes the forward. I remember buying a book of his years ago called Websites That Work. While a beautiful book, it was before its time and lacking what Krug has written into this book. I'd recommend this to anyone who has purchased Nielsen's book. It refreshing that there is actually credible suggestion out there.
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Summary: Simple design principles that work
Review: Ordinarily, I avoid using the phrase "common sense", considering it to be one of those generalities used when you are unable or unwilling to categorize an algorithm. However, in this case, it applies and is the only phrase that can be accurately used to describe web design techniques. The author is refreshing, in that he avoids any hint of passion in the explanations of what is right and wrong about web design. Taken by itself, his "what you use depends on the situation" approach appears to be wishy-washy. However, the most important point of the book, namely that there is no such thing as a typical web user, makes this a requirement.
His other point about the necessity for usability testing is one that we all understand. However, the points about getting effective feedback using only a few people is so correct that it will foster disbelief in those who believe that you must spend big to get the best results. Such people ignore the simple rules of statistical sampling. In a population with a great deal of overlapping variation, the random choice of three or four will almost always provide a group covering much of the spectrum. The key to getting effective feedback about a site is not to sample large but to sample well and pay attention to what the subjects say.
All feedback must also be passed through a reality analysis filter as well. There as many shades of like and dislike concerning the style of a web page as there are opinions about economic policy. As the author so effectively points out, a user saying "I like it" can range from, "I like this feature and will not use the site without it" to "I like this feature but will happily use the site if it is not there." The first is of course the most serious, but it also must be exposed to a critical examination before being taken seriously to the point of inclusion.
In summarizing the content of this book, it may appear that I am killing it with faint praise when I say that the best way to describe it is that the advice is practical. However, in the emerging art form known as web design, that is as good as it can get.
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