Reading Post: Don't Make Me Think, ch1-6

Our latest reading assignment is Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. In the style of Williams, it's a slender volume with a straightforward approach and lots of visual examples. Unlike The Non-Designer's Design Book, however, the rules here are explained in some detail, letting you know why it's important to do each of the things he recommends, which I find extremely useful.

The style of writing is different, as well - Krug composes his narrative in a witty, conversational tone that sits very well with me. He notes that laughter is an occasional side effect of reading his work, and he isn't kidding - I chuckled a few times on my way through, but somewhere around page 46 in the section "Happy Talk Must Die" I lost it.

We all know happy talk when we see it: It's the introductory text that's supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we're about to see in the section we've just entered.

If you're not sure whether something is happy talk, there's one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, "Blah blah blah blah blah ..."

Well, let's just say I've been there.

I don't see much point in citing a specific example for each of his rules, because the book is rife with sites that work well and suggestions to improve ones that don't, but one thing came to mind over and over during this reading: library websites.

The primary problem, in my experience, is search boxes. We've already spoken about ineffective searches, of course, but what about situations where the search works just fine as long as you find the right combination of settings? Both the Monroe County Library System and the Potsdam Public Library are guilty of this - searching in either catalog is a frustrating experience, because I never know if I've put in the wrong terms, selected the wrong categories from the drop-down, or if they really don't have any mention of the book I'm looking for. This is especially irritating when I'm searching for a recently released by widely circulated book - they should have a copy of it somewhere, but since libraries are notoriously underfunded, there's no real way of knowing if it's still on a wait list somewhere, or just tucked away in some obscure section of the database and needs to be coaxed out with great patience.

Even if one chooses to forgo the search and simply attempt to browse categories, one is in for a frustrating experience. Considering the careful organization of a physical library, I find it hugely frustrating that so many of them translate so poorly to digital. Navigation of the stacks - such a simple procedure when being performed literally - becomes a lengthy procedure when done online, one that results in getting lost multiple times, requires frequent restarts, and rarely finds me the book I want. It irks me that the very thing Weinberger cites as exemplifying physical organization has so much trouble translating to the next order of order.

Finally, a note on instructions: In general, I agree that unnecessary instructions are irritating, and should be done away with. However, some sites desperately need some guidelines. I submit for your consideration the Monroe County Visual Catalog. If you can figure out how to use that in any effective way, please let me know what you've done - despite years of banging my head against it, I always wound up going back to the old-style outdated and similarly frustrating text catalog, because at least the latter could be made to work eventually.