Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

by Steve Krug

Latest press release is five days old.

  I go to the About Us page.

  No promising links, but plenty of promotions, which is very annoying. Why are they trying to sell me more tickets when I’m not sure they’re going to fly me tomorrow?

  I search for “strike” and find two press releases about a strike a year ago and pages from the corporate history about a strike in the 1950s.

  At this point, I would like to leave, but they’re the sole source for this information.

  I look through their FAQ lists, then leave.

  The reservoir is limited, and if you treat users badly enough and exhaust it there’s a good chance that they’ll leave. But leaving isn’t the only possible negative outcome; they may not be as eager to use your site in the future, or they may think less of your organization and savage you on Facebook or Twitter. For those of you in marketing, your NPS (Net Promoter Score) probably goes down.

  There are a few things worth noting about this reservoir:

  It’s idiosyncratic. Some people have a large reservoir, some small. Some people are more suspicious by nature, or more ornery; others are inherently more patient, trusting, or optimistic. The point is, you can’t count on a very large reserve.

  It’s situational. If I’m in a huge hurry, or have just come from a bad experience on another site, my expendable goodwill may already be low when I enter your site, even if I naturally have a large reserve.

  You can refill it. Even if you’ve made mistakes that have diminished my goodwill, you can replenish it by doing things that make me feel like you’re looking out for my best interests.

  Sometimes a single mistake can empty it. For instance, just opening up a registration form with tons of fields may be enough to cause some people’s reserve to plunge instantly to zero.

  Things that diminish goodwill

  Here are a few of the things that tend to make users feel like the people publishing a site don’t have their best interests at heart:

  Hiding information that I want. The most common things to hide are customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, and prices.

  The whole point of hiding support phone numbers is to try to keep users from calling, because each call costs money. The usual effect is to diminish goodwill and ensure that they’ll be even more annoyed when they do find the number and call. On the other hand, if the 800 number is in plain sight—perhaps even on every page—somehow knowing that they can call if they want to is often enough to keep people looking for the information on the site longer, increasing the chances that they’ll solve the problem themselves.

  Some sites hide pricing information in hopes of getting users so far into the process that they’ll feel vested in it by the time they experience the sticker shock. My favorite example is Web sites for wireless access in public places like airports. Having seen a “Wireless access available!” sign and knowing that it’s free at some airports, you open up your laptop, find a signal, and try to connect. But then you have to scan, read, and click your way through three pages, following links like “Wireless Access” and “Click here to connect” before you get to a page that even hints at what it might cost you. It feels like an old phone sales tactic: If they can just keep you on the line long enough and keep throwing more of their marketing pitch at you, maybe they can convince you along the way.

  Punishing me for not doing things your way. I should never have to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in my Social Security number, spaces in my credit card number, or parentheses in my phone number. Many sites perversely insist on no spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much easier to type the number correctly. Don’t make me jump through hoops just because you don’t want to write a little bit of code.

  Asking me for information you don’t really need. Most users are very skeptical of requests for personal information and find it annoying if a site asks for more than what’s needed for the task at hand.

  Shucking and jiving me. We’re always on the lookout for faux sincerity, and disingenuous attempts to convince me that you care about me can be particularly annoying. Think about what goes through your head every time you hear “Your call is important to us.”

  Putting sizzle in my way. Having to wade through pages bloated with feel-good marketing photos makes it clear that you don’t understand—or care—that I’m in a hurry.

  Your site looks amateurish. You can lose goodwill if your site looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like no effort has gone into making it presentable.

  Note that while people love to make comments about the appearance of sites—especially about whether they like the colors—almost no one is going to leave a site just because it doesn’t look great. (I tell people to ignore all comments that users make about colors during a user test, unless three out of four people use a word like “puke” to describe the color scheme. Then it’s worth rethinking.2)

  2 This actually happened once during a round of testing I facilitated. We changed the color.

  There may be times when you’ll choose to have your site do some of these user-unfriendly things deliberately. Sometimes it makes business sense not to do exactly what the customer wants. For instance, uninvited pop-ups almost always annoy people to some extent. But if your statistics show you can get 10 percent more revenue by using pop-ups and you think it’s worth annoying your users, you can do it. It’s a business decision. Just be sure you do it in an informed way, rather than inadvertently.

  Things that increase goodwill

  The good news is that even if you make mistakes, it’s possible to restore my goodwill by doing things that convince me that you do have my interests at heart. Most of these are just the flip side of the other list:

  Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy. It’s usually not hard to figure out what people want to do on a given Web site. I find that even people who disagree about everything else about their organization’s site almost always give me the same answer when I ask them, “What are the three main things your users want to do?” The problem is, making those things easy doesn’t always become the top priority it should be. (If most people are coming to your site to apply for a mortgage, nothing should get in the way of making it dead easy to apply for a mortgage.)

  Tell me what I want to know. Be upfront about things like shipping costs, hotel daily parking fees, service outages—anything you’d rather not be upfront about. You may lose points if your shipping rates are higher than I’d like, but you’ll often gain enough points for candor and for making it easy for me to compensate for the price difference.

  Save me steps wherever you can. For instance, instead of giving me the shipping company’s tracking number for my purchase, put a link in my email receipt that opens their site and submits my tracking number when I click it. (As usual, Amazon was the first site to do this for me.)

  Put effort into it. My favorite example is the HP technical support site, where it seems like an enormous amount of work has gone into (a) generating the information I need to solve my problems, (b) making sure that it’s accurate and useful, (c) presenting it clearly, and (d) organizing it so I can find it. I’ve had a lot of HP printers, and in almost every case where I’ve had a problem I’ve been able to solve it on my own. As a result, I keep buying HP printers.

  Know what questions I’m likely to have, and answer them. Frequently Asked Questions lists are enormously valuable, especially if

  They really are FAQs, not marketing pitches masquerading as FAQs (also known as QWWPWAs: Questions We Wish People Would Ask).

  You keep them up to date. Customer Service and Technical Support can easily give you a list of this week’s five most frequently asked questions. I would always put this list at the top of any site’s Support page.

  They’re candid. Often people are looking in the FAQs for the answer to a question you’d rather they hadn’t asked. Candor in these situations goes a long way to increasing goodwi
ll.

  Provide me with creature comforts like printer-friendly pages. Some people love being able to print stories that span multiple pages with a single click, and CSS makes it relatively easy to create printer-friendly pages with little additional effort. Drop the ads (the possibility of a banner ad having any impact other than being annoying is even greater when it’s just taking up space on paper), but don’t drop the illustrations, photos, and figures.

  Make it easy to recover from errors. If you actually do enough user testing, you’ll be able to spare me from many errors before they happen. But where the potential for errors is unavoidable, always provide a graceful, obvious way for me to recover.

  When in doubt, apologize. Sometimes you can’t help it: You just don’t have the ability or resources to do what the user wants (for instance, your university’s library system requires separate passwords for each of your catalog databases, so you can’t give users the single login they’d like). If you can’t do what they want, at least let them know that you know you’re inconveniencing them.

  Chapter 12. Accessibility and you

  JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU’RE DONE, A CAT FLOATS BY WITH BUTTERED TOAST STRAPPED TO ITS BACK

  When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.

  —JOHN FRAZEE, IN THE JOURNAL OF IRREPRODUCIBLE RESULTS

  People sometimes ask me, “What about accessibility? Isn’t that part of usability?”

  And they’re right, of course. Unless you’re going to make a blanket decision that people with disabilities aren’t part of your audience, you really can’t say your site is usable unless it’s accessible.

  At this point, everyone involved in Web design knows at least a little bit about Web accessibility. And yet almost every site I go to still fails my three-second accessibility test—increasing the size of the type.1

  1 If you’re about to send me email reminding me that Zoom has replaced Text Size in most browsers, thanks, but you can save those keystrokes. Every site gets larger if you use Zoom, but only sites that have moved beyond fixed-size fonts (usually a good indicator of effort to make things accessible) respond to Text Size.

  Before

  After (no difference)

  Why is that?

  What developers and designers hear

  In most organizations, the people who end up being responsible for doing something about accessibility are the people who actually build the thing: the designers and the developers.

  When they try to learn about what they should do, whatever books or articles they pick up inevitably list the same set of reasons why they need to make their sites accessible:

  There’s a lot of truth in all of these. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot that’s unlikely to convince 22-year-old developers and designers that they should be “doing accessibility.” Two arguments in particular tend to make them skeptical:

  ___% of the population has a disability. Since their world consists largely of able-bodied 22-year-olds, it’s very hard for them to believe that a large percentage of the population actually needs help accessing the Web. They’re willing to write it off as the kind of exaggeration that people make when they’re advocating for a worthy cause, but there’s also a natural inclination to think, “If one of their claims is so clearly untrue, I’m entitled to be skeptical about the rest.”

  Making things more accessible benefits everyone. They know that some adaptations do, like the classic example, closed captioning, which does often come in handy for people who can hear.2 But since this always seems to be the only example cited, it feels a little like arguing that the space program was worthwhile because it gave us Tang.3 It’s much easier for developers and designers to imagine cases where accessibility adaptations are likely to make things worse for “everyone else.”

  2 Melanie and I often use it when watching British films, for instance.

  3 A powdered orange-flavored breakfast drink, invented for the astronauts (see also: freeze-dried food).

  The worst thing about this skepticism is that it obscures the fact that there’s really only one reason that’s important:

  It’s the right thing to do. And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. Personally, I don’t think anyone should need more than this one example: Blind people with access to a computer can now read almost any newspaper or magazine on their own. Imagine that.

  How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?

  And for those of you who don’t find this argument compelling, be aware that even if you haven’t already encountered it, there will be a legislative stick coming sooner or later. Count on it.

  What designers and developers fear

  As they learn more about accessibility, two fears tend to emerge:

  More work. For developers in particular, accessibility can seem like just one more complicated new thing to fit into an already impossible project schedule. In the worst case, it gets handed down as an “initiative” from above, complete with time-consuming reports, reviews, and task force meetings.

  Compromised design. What designers fear most is what I refer to as buttered cats: places where good design for people with disabilities and good design for everyone else are going to be in direct opposition. They’re worried that they’re going to be forced to design sites that are less appealing—and less useful—for the majority of their audience.

  In an ideal world, accessibility would work like a sign I saw in the back of a Chicago taxi. At first it looked like an ordinary sign. But something about the way it caught the light made me take a closer look, and when I did, I realized that it was ingenious.

  The sign was overlaid with a thin piece of Plexiglas, and the message was embossed in Braille on the Plexiglas. Ordinarily, both the print and the Braille would have been half as large so they could both fit on the sign, but with this design each audience got the best possible experience. It was an elegant solution.

  I think for some designers, though, accessibility conjures up an image something like the Vonnegut short story where the government creates equality by handicapping everyone.4

  4 In “Harrison Bergeron,” the main character, whose intelligence is “way above normal,” is required by law to wear a “mental handicap radio” in his ear that blasts various loud noises every 20 seconds “to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”

  The truth is, it can be complicated

  When people start reading about accessibility, they usually come across one piece of advice that sounds very promising:

  The problem is, when they run their site through a validator, it turns out to be more like a grammar checker than a spell checker. Yes, it does find some obvious mistakes and oversights that are easy to fix, like missing alt text.5 But it also inevitably turns up a series of vague warnings that you may be doing something wrong and a long list of recommendations of things for you to check that it admits may not be problems at all.

  5 Alt text provides a text description of an image (“Picture of two men on a sailboat,” for example), which is essential for people using screen readers or browsing with images turned off.

  This can be very discouraging for people who are just learning about accessibility, because the long lists and ambiguous advice suggest that there’s an awful lot to learn.

  And the truth is, it’s a lot harder than it ought to be to make a site accessible.

  After all, most designers and developers are not going to become accessibility experts. If Web accessibility is going to become ubiquitous, it’s going to have to be
easier to do. Screen readers and other adaptive technologies have to get smarter, the tools for building sites (like Dreamweaver) have to make it easier to code correctly for accessibility, and our design processes need to be updated to include thinking about accessibility from the beginning.

  The four things you can do right now

  The fact that it’s not a perfect world at the moment doesn’t let any of us off the hook, though.

  Even with current technology and standards, it’s possible to make any site very accessible without an awful lot of effort by focusing on a few things that will have the most impact. And they don’t involve getting anywhere near a buttered cat.

  #1. Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone

  One of the things that I find annoying about the Tang argument (“making sites accessible makes them more usable for everyone”) is that it obscures the fact that the reverse actually is true: Making sites more usable for “the rest of us” is one of the most effective ways to make them more effective for people with disabilities.

  If something confuses most people who use your site, it’s almost certain to confuse users who have accessibility issues. (After all, people don’t suddenly become remarkably smarter just because they have a disability.) And it’s very likely that they’re going to have a harder time recovering from their confusion.

  For instance, think of the last time you had trouble using a Web site (running into a confusing error message when you submitted a form, for example). Now imagine trying to solve that problem without being able to see the page.