As part of a class assignment, I was told to read Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. Honestly, at first I thought to myself “I don’t have time for this.” But once I was able to get a hold of the book at the library and began reading through it, I realized how useful this book really is. I feel that it’s an accurate and pretty up-to-date guide of Internet usage.
Countless times I found myself thinking about how I use the Internet and how Steve Krug was pinpointing specific habits of mine. It was a little weird to think that pretty much everyone works the same way. I also found the book to be very helpful not just for my online class blog.
As an intern for a radio station, I work mostly on online content. I’m a sports writer but we’re also trying to add more than just articles to our website. The website itself is a work in progress so this book definitely helped. It gives great, easy tips to make any website better, easier and more appealing to the public.
What the book points out is very true; people don’t really like having to use their brains. When we go online, we expect to find exactly what we want and have it clearly outlined for us. We expect to type in a word, phrase, or subject and BOOM, have all the information we want and nothing extra that we don’t need. Therefore, websites these days have to be as user-friendly as possible and everything needs to be laid out in an easy-to-find format.
One tip that I thought was extremely useful is the idea of always incorporating a search bar in a website. Chances are people are not just browsing around to see what they can find within a website; they know exactly what they want and they want to be able to find it quickly. This is especially true for a website with a lot of content.
I know for our station’s website, there was not a search bar in the site and it made it really difficult when I was trying to look up one of my past articles. I would have to go page by page back in time and scroll through each article because I couldn’t simply search my name within the site.
Probably the most important part of Don’t Make Me Think, was it’s section on how to design your website for easy reading. I can attest to the statement that most people scan instead of read when they’re on a website. If people see too many words cluttered together, they’re automatically going to skip that page or leave the website entirely. Having things laid out in a clear, short, definite way will increase audience activity for a website.
Overall, I thought Don’t Make Me Think was a great read and definitely something that anyone interested in creating a website, blog, or working at all with online media should read. The tips were very helpful and easy to apply to real life scenarios.
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