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

Farmers vs. cowmen
On top of this layer of personal passion, there’s another layer: professional
passion. Like the farmers and the cowmen in 
Oklahoma!,
the players on a
Web team have very different perspectives on what constitutes good Web
design based on what they do for a living.
1
1
 
In the play, the thrifty, God-fearing, family-oriented farmers are always at odds with the
freewheeling, loose-living cowmen. Farmers love fences, cowmen love the open range.
The ideal Web page as seen by someone whose job is...
It’s always seemed to me that these people probably have the jobs they do
because of who they 
are
. Designers, for instance, probably became designers
because they enjoy pleasant visual experiences. They get visceral pleasure
from looking at pages full of elegant type and subtle visual cues. There are
endorphins involved.
And developers tend to like complexity. They enjoy figuring out how things
work, reverse engineering them in their head, and looking for ideas they can
use. Again, there are endorphins at work.
And because these reactions are happening at a brain-chemical level, it’s
very difficult for them to imagine that everybody doesn’t feel exactly the
same way.
The result is that designers want to build sites that look great, and developers
want to build sites with interesting, original, ingenious features. I’m not sure
who’s the farmer and who’s the cowman in this picture, but I do know that
their differences in perspective often lead to conflict—and hard feelings—
when it comes time to establish design priorities.

---

At the same time, designers and developers often find themselves siding
together in another, larger clash between what Art Kleiner describes as the
cultures of hype and craft.
2
2
 
See “Corporate Culture in Internet Time” in
 strategy+business 
magazine at 
strategy-
business.com/press/article/10374
.
While the hype culture (upper management, marketing, and business
development) is focused on making whatever promises are necessary to
attract venture capital, revenue-generating deals, and users to the site, the
burden of delivering on those promises lands on the shoulders of the craft
culture artisans like the designers and developers.
This modern high-tech version of the perennial struggle between art and
commerce (or perhaps farmers and cowmen vs. the railroad barons) adds
another level of complexity to any discussions of usability issues—often in
the form of apparently arbitrary edicts handed down from the hype side of
the fence.
3
3
 
I once saw a particularly puzzling feature on the Home page of a prominent—and otherwise
sensibly designed—site. When I asked about it, I was told, “Oh, that. It came to our CEO in a
dream, so we had to add it.” True story.