February 2025
Service Design
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Edit: After some time, I now understand that this book is a household staple.
In the weeks leading up to starting my UX certification program at Georgia Tech, all of the prospective students were given a reading list. There were three mandated reading assignments:
1. ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ by Steve Krug
2. ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ by Don Norman
3. ‘What is User Experience Design?’ by Jacob Gube
It took me a few weeks to get hold of the copy at my local library but it was worth the wait. Spoiler alert: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The book is a quick read but packed with essential content and principles. Below are my takeaways and thoughts on the book.
Straightaway, Steve Krug starts by better defining usability as it pertains to UX/Product design: usability breaks down into: useful, learnable, memorable, effective, efficient, desirable, delightful - a definition that is substantiated by Don Norman.
User’s don’t want to have to think. Krug provides the analogy of users scanning a webpage like a:
“billboard going by at 60 miles per hour.”
Users also tend to do a few things that help UX professionals to understand their behavior:
1. Users don’t read pages - they can scam
2. Users don’t make optimal choices, they satisfice (Barry Schwartz language)
3. Users muddle through tasks rather than figuring out how things work
Some basic principles of design include:
1. Take advantage of conventions
2. Create effective visual hierarchies
3. Break up pages into clearly defined areas
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable
5. Eliminate distractions
6. Format content to support scanning
All of these principles sound great but there is one problem with them:
“designers are often reluctant to take advantage of [conventions]”
One of my favorite quotes from this book was:
“Happy talk must die: Happy talk is like small talk - content free, basically just a way to be sociable.”
UX writing/technical writing is an art; it’s very different from how most students are conditioned to write in their respective English courses throughout formal education.
Not really. It’s pretty unpleasant when a user is trying to complete a task in a specified period of time - it can even be a source of stress.
Navigation is one of the most important features of any digital product; Krug primarily uses “web” examples in this book but the principle is the same. He states:
“Navigation isn’t just a feature of a website; it is the website.”
Navigation:
1. Tells users what’s there
2. Tells users how to use the site/application
3. Gives users confidence in the people who built it (trust!!)
“Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design but sometimes users are in a hurry and need more obvious cues.”
“the home page is the waterfront property of the web.”
Krug uses the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ analogy to describe what happens to a lot of homepages: they get neglected and abused until they’re often no longer reflective of the purpose of the site/product.
*This section in particular was extremely valuable while working in a specific role.
First and foremost:
“All web users are unique. And all web use is basically idiosyncratic.”
With this in mind, Krug reminds us of the importance of testing: it makes it impossible for designers/stakeholders to view all users as the same.
Usability testing is about strategy too: it’s better to test early and test often than to test with a large group at the end. It is NEVER too early to start testing. Two other super important takeaways are:
“Quantitative testing is for proving things; qualitative testing is for improving things.”
“Focus ruthlessly on fixing the most serious problems first.”
Krug talks about something that I set out to learn more about shortly before reading this book: how to build trust with users. He refers to this as ‘the reservoir of goodwill.’
Things that diminish the reservoir of goodwill:
1. hiding information
2. punishing users for not doing things a specific way
3. asking for information that isn’t needed
4. shucking and jiving
5. putting sizzle in the way
6. the site looks amateurish
Things that increase the reservoir of goodwill:
1. know the main things that people want from the site/product: make them obvious (UX)
2. tell users what they want to know
3. save steps wherever you can
4. put effort into users
5. know possible questions/answers (FAQ)
6. provide creature comforts
7. make it easy to recover from errors
8. when in doubt, apologize
Often times, accessibility makes its way onto the ‘Trends to Look out for in ______’ lists but Krug kindly reminds us that this should not be the case.
It is reasonable and expected for designers to add things like: alt text, keyboard accessible content, color contrast checks and accessible templates.
This book was so widely recommended that I pretty much knew it would be great; and it was! I believe Steve Krug gets to the point and highlights several things that still warrant attention - even in 2023! I appreciate that the book was also intended for a pretty broad audience; we can all stand to learn from each other or at least be reminded of issues that escape our daily thoughts. While the book can be read by a wide audience, there were just enough specific statements that made it most relevant to designers - “designers are often reluctant to take advantage of [conventions]” for example.
I read this book for the first time in June 2021 and have used the principles constantly since. I just re-read it (April, 2023) and the principles still apply - albeit in slightly different ways. There are a plethora of different UXR methodologies out there, but I like that Krug implies that usability testing is one of the most valuable; in context, he does a great job at differentiating between methodologies used in marketing (ex. focus groups) and methodologies used in design specific research.
The real reason I set out to read this book (aside from it being on my school suggested reading list) was to learn how to better build trust with users via design decisions. Krug provided some great answers by talking about ‘the reservoir of goodwill’ and providing specific ways to build/diminish it (see above). I have used these principles countless times and will continue to reference them in the future!
I’ll probably read this book again in a year or so!.
10/10.
