Steve Krug Quotes

I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt.

Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.

The main thing it usually ends up doing is revealing that the things they were arguing about weren't all that important. People often test to decide which color drapes are best, only to learn that they forgot to put windows in the room.

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What

Don't make me think

If there's one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it's that almost any design idea
no matter how appallingly bad
can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort.

The problem is, the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren't shared equally. The section that's being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.

When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design.

It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left.

In reality, though, most of the time we don't choose the best option - we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.

Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.

The problem is there are no simple "right" answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need - carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

Happy talk must die

Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are
generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.

Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away.

There's almost always a plausible rationale - and a good, if misguided, intention - behind every usability flaw. Another

(Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.)

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.

If you're going to implement video, do it as well as YouTube does it or don't do it at all.

And not just the right thing; it's profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn't get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people's lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people's lives just by doing our job a little better?

I usually call these endless discussions "religious debates," because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can't be proven - supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important

Sincerity: that's the hard part. If you can fake that, the rest is easy.

Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.

The fact that the people who built the site didn't care enough to make things obvious - and easy - can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.