Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Making Sure You Got them Right

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Chapter 8. “The Farmer and the Cowman Should
Be Friends”
WHY MOST ARGUMENTS ABOUT USABILITY ARE A WASTE OF
TIME, AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
One man likes to push a plough The other likes to chase a cow But that’s no
reason why they can’t be friends!
—
OKLAHOMA!,
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II
Left to their own devices, Web teams aren’t notoriously successful at making
decisions about usability questions. Most teams end up spending a lot of
precious time rehashing the same issues over and over.
Consider this scene:

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I usually call these endless discussions “religious debates,” because they
have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They
consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about
things that can’t be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the
best way to do something important (whether it’s attaining eternal peace,
governing effectively, or just designing Web pages). And, like most religious
debates, they rarely result in anyone involved changing his or her point of
view.
Besides wasting time, these arguments create tension and erode respect
among team members and can often prevent the team from making critical

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decisions.
Unfortunately, there are several forces at work in most Web teams that make
these debates almost inevitable. In this chapter, I’ll describe these forces and
explain what I think is the best antidote.
“Everybody likes ________.”
All of us who work on Web sites have one thing in common—we’re also
Web users. And like all Web users, we tend to have strong feelings about
what we like and don’t like about Web sites.
As individuals, we love pages with main menus across the top and submenus
down the left side because they’re familiar and easy to use, or we hate them
because they’re so boring. We love pages with large evocative images
because they’re engaging, or we hate them because we just want to get to the
content. We really enjoy using sites with ______, or we find ______ to be a
royal pain.
And when we’re working on a Web team, it turns out to be very hard to
check those feelings at the door.
The result is usually a room full of individuals with strong personal
convictions about what makes for a good Web site.
And given the strength of these convictions—and human nature—there’s a
natural tendency to project these likes and dislikes onto users in general: to
think that most users like the same things we like. We tend to think that most
users are like us.

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It’s not that we think that 
everyone
is like us. We know there are 
some
people out there who hate the things we love—after all, there are even some
of them on our own Web team. But not 
sensible
people. And there aren’t
many of them.