Dreaming in Digital

Steve Krug – “Don’t Make Me Think” 03/28/2010

Steve Krug – Don’t Make Me Think

Web Design Isn’t Great Literature
When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at. We’re thinking “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), while the user’s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles per hour.” (Krug, p. 21)

We Don’t Read What’s On the Web, We Scan
One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye. Why do we scan? We’re usually in a hurry. Much of our Web use is motivated by the desire to save time. As a result, Web users tend to act like sharks: they have to keep moving, or they’ll die. We just don’t have the time to read any more than necessary. We know we don’t need to read everything. On most pages, we’re really only interested in a fraction of what’s on the page. We’re just looking for the bits that match our interest or the task at hand, and the rest of it is irrelevant. Scanning is how we find the relevant bits. We’re good at it. We’ve been scanning newspapers, magazines, and books all our lives to find the parts we’re interested in, and we know that it works. (Krug, p. 23) (more…)