Amazon.co.uk Review
Usability design is one of the most important though often least attractive tasks for a Web developer. In
Don't Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humour and excellent to-the-point examples.
The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques and examples presented within it revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book's assumptions. For example, "We don't read pages--we scan them" and, "We don't figure out how things work--we muddle through". Getting to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces top-notch sites.
Using an attractive mix of full-colour screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the "before and after" examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.
This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert's ability to judge Web design. You'll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again. --Stephen W Plain
Book Description
This handbook presents the principles that are important to keep in mind when evaluating site usability to enhance a visitor's experience. Based on exhaustive user research, this book will be the first such title to present conclusions drawn from real data rather than theory and upposition. Don't Make Me Think! will povide much-needed answers to perennially debated questions about the right way to design Web sites by focussing the debate on real usability issues rather than from design turf wars. It will boost the reader's "usability IQ" so they can detect usability problems in the sites they manage, design, build, or pay for.
Written in a conversational style, profusely illustrated, with powerful but clear down to earth explanations of easy-to-understand examples, Krug will cover such topics a how to think about usability, how to develop a sensibility for what works and what doesn't, how to perform usability testing on a shoe-string, getting designers and web developers to work together, and navigational guidelines.
See all Product Description