Product Description

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day.  In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike.  Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design.

Three New Chapters!

• Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites
• Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible
• Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims
  

"I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book.  Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site.  After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book.

In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing.  If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book."  -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #763 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Usability design is one of the most important though often least attractive tasks for a Web developer. In Don't Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humour and excellent to-the-point examples.

The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques and examples presented within it revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book's assumptions. For example, "We don't read pages--we scan them" and, "We don't figure out how things work--we muddle through". Getting to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces top-notch sites.

Using an attractive mix of full-colour screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the "before and after" examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.

This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert's ability to judge Web design. You'll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again. --Stephen W Plain

From the Author
Even if every Web site could afford a usability expert (which they can't), there just aren't enough of us to go around. So I tried to boil down what I've learned over the years (principles like "Don't make me think" and "Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left") into a short, profusely illustrated book‹one that even the guy who signs the checks (the one who looks at the site when it's ready to launch and says "I hate green. And there should be more big pictures.") might read.

From the Back Cover
Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day.  In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike.  Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design.

Three New Chapters!

• Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites
• Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible
• Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims
  

"I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book.  Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site.  After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book.

In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing.  If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book."  -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

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Customer Reviews

Great sections on navigation, home page design, usability
What makes this book valuable:
- in-depth treatment of navigation design. The sections on tabs and breadcrumbs are especially excellent;
- great section on effective home page design. Get this book along with Nielsen's "Homepage Usability", and you're set in this department.
- wonderful primer on usability testing. If your web team is small, this could be all you need to get started with informal user testing. My own experience supports Steve's: you don't have to have Ph.D. in human factors to facilitate fruitful usability tests;
- last, but not least, the book is very easy to read due to its witty tone, short paragraphs, and tons of bullets.
One thing this book could do better:
- make the headings more informative, saving the witticisms for the body copy. This would have made it a quicker at-a-glance reference.

Conclusion:
The book scores a perfect 10 with its target audience: the designers, developers, project managers, producers, marketers, and those who "sign the check". Just buy it.

Short and effective, makes a powerful point
At last, an author who follows his own advice! This book is short and easy to read (at 200 pages, I read it in a day), but surprisingly deep. The book is peppered with colour screenshots, black and white cartoons and pithy quotes and headings. A pleasure, not a chore, to read.

The basic premise is simple; people don't like hard choices or stopping to think, they just want to get something done. The more self-evident a web site is, the easier it is to use. Implementing it, and being sure you've got it right, is tricky, though. Krug covers site and page layout, navigation design, usability testing on a shoestring as well as a broad and engaging model of how people really use the web.

It doesn't deal with internationalization at all, seems to assume a mostly static site, and offers no real help in getting your idea to the web in the first place, but will help you make good choices along the way. Well worth a read, and probably worth a refresher each time you start a new project to keep you on track.

The best book on Web Usability that I have read.
In a subject that is often preachy, dry and sometimes event pedantic in style, Krug's approach is a breath of fresh air.
The book is entertaining and informative at the same time - it uses lots of illustrations to make its point, and that point is dead simple - Don't Make Me Think!
Unfortunately, it is the user that shouldn't have to think - designers, architects, developers and content authors really do need to think hard about how to create websites for the audience. This book goes a long way to helping them.
I would recommend this book to anyone involved in website design (and indeed I have!).