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

It’s all about tradeoffs
One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it’s essentially about
constraints (things you 
have to
do and things you 
can’t
do) and tradeoffs (the
less-than-ideal choices you make to live within the constraints).

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To paraphrase Lincoln, the best you can do is please some of the people
some of the time.
2
2
 ...if, in fact, he ever actually said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the
people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” One of the things
I’ve learned from the Internet is that when it comes to memorable sayings attributed to famous
people, 92% of the time they never said them. See 
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln
.
There’s a well-established meme that suggests that rather than being the
negative force that they often feel like, constraints actually make design
easier and foster innovation.
And it’s true that constraints are often helpful. If a sofa has to fit in 
this
space and match 
this
color scheme, it’s sometimes easier to find one than if
you just go shopping for any sofa. Having 
something
pinned down can have
a focusing effect, where a blank canvas with its unlimited options—while it
sounds liberating—can have a paralyzing effect.
You may not buy the idea that constraints are a positive influence, but it
really doesn’t matter: Whenever you’re designing, you’re dealing with
constraints. And where there are constraints, there are tradeoffs to be made.
In my experience, many—if not most—serious usability problems are the
result of a poor decision about a tradeoff.
For example, I don’t use CBS News on my iPhone.
I’ve learned over time that their stories are broken up into too-small (for me)
chunks, and each one takes a long time to load. (If the pages loaded faster, I
might not mind.) And to add insult to injury, on each new page you have to
scroll down past the same photo to get to the next tiny morsel of text.
Here’s what the experience looks like:

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Tap to open the story, then wait. And wait. And wait.

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When the page finally loads, swipe to scroll down past the photo.

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Read the two paragraphs of text, then tap Next and wait. And wait.

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Repeat 8 times to read the whole story.
It’s so annoying that when I’m scanning Google News (which I do several
times a day) and notice that the story I’m about to tap is linked to CBS
News, I always click on Google’s “More stories” link to choose another
source.
When I run into a problem like this, I know that it’s not there because the
people who designed it didn’t think about it. In fact, I’m sure it was the
subject of some intense debate that resulted in a compromise.

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I don’t know what constraints were at work in this particular tradeoff. Since
there are ads on the pages, it may have been a need to generate more page
views. Or it could have something to do with the way the content is
segmented for other purposes in their content management system. I have no
idea. All I do know is that the choice they made didn’t place enough weight
on creating a good experience for the user.
Most of the challenges in creating good mobile usability boil down to
making good tradeoffs.