Project for class

1. Don’t Make Me Think
Designing Effective Websites
Jason White

2. Usability: A person of average (or even below
average) ability and experience can figure out
how to use the thing to accomplish something
without it being more trouble than it is worth.
o Basic principle to Eliminate question marks
o Limit a person’s thinking by keeping everything no more than 2
clicks away
o My Impression to this idea is that we all have shiny object
syndrome when looking at websites. If something draws your
attention from the goal of the site, or causes you to have to
pause to complete a task, the site designer did not take usability
into consideration.

3. The Design of Everyday
Things
• Make it obvious what is clickable: “Don Norman
explains so enjoyably in his recently updated
usability classic The Design of Everyday
Things, we’re constantly parsing our
environment (like the handles on doors) for
these clues (to decide whether to pull or push).”
 I was excited for this quote to show up in
the book as I found the example so true.
I have started looking closer at doors to
see were the handles are and which way
they swing open.

4. Design Ideas
o Take advantage of conventions: Using
existing widely used or standardized design
patterns.
o Create visual hierarchies: Good visual
hierarchies make it easier for a viewer to
find the important information on a website
by creating priority and emphasis on
content to limit processing time.
o Break pages into clearly defined areas:
“Eye-tracking studies of Web page scanning
suggest that users decide very quickly in
their initial glances which parts of the page
are likely to have useful information and
then rarely look at the other parts.”

5. Design Ideas
o Eliminate distractions: Visual
noise is the enemy
 3 types of noise: Shouting,
Disorganization, Clutter
o Format content for scanning:
 Use plenty of headings
 Keep paragraphs short
 Use bulleted lists
 Highlight key terms

6. Mindless Choices
o Links need to be clearly labeled so they create an
unambiguously identified target for the user to reach
their goal.
o User Guidance
 Brief: The smallest amount of information that will help
me
 Timely: Placed so I encounter it exactly when I need it
 Unavoidable: Formatted in a way that ensures that I’ll
notice it
When I saw the design ideas and mindless choices
topics I couldn’t help but identify with them. I have
the attention span of a fly and get distracted very
easily. If a site has to many decisions to make, or is
not clear about how to use it, I tend to leave the site
and not return.

7. Omission of needless words
o Reduction of noise, Promoting of useful content,
Short pages to allow the page to be seen
without scrolling
o “Your objective should always be to eliminate
instructions entirely by making everything self-
explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When
instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them
back to the bare minimum.”
o Clear, simple and persistent navigation: Use of
these reduce the likelihood that a user will get
frustrated with your site and not return to it

8. Omission of needless words
o Persistent Navigation:
 Site Id
 Sections
 Utilities
 Home Button
o Tabs can be important as they are self evident,
hard to miss and slick
o Well designed page:
 What site is this? (Site ID)
 What page am I on? (Page name)
 What are the major sections of this site? (Sections)
 What are my options at this level? (Local navigation)
 Where am I in the scheme of things? (“You are here”
indicators)
 How can I search?

9. Omission of needless words
o Street Signs
 Every page needs a name
 Page name at top of page
o Bread crumbs
 Should be at top of the page
 “>” should separate each level of the path
 Use bold typeface to show current location
The idea of bread crumbs is one of my biggest pet peeves
when it comes to website design. I like to know how I got to
a page on a site, and if I want to go back to a different
specific page I like to have that option. When sites do not
include the path of the site, it causes a user to have to go
back to the homepage and start over.

10. Usability Testing
o Usability tests not focus group
o Test early, test often; cheaper in
the long run
This topic is the one that I have personally
seen cost web designers a good deal of
time and money. If you just design a site
without testing its usability, you could run
into issues that cause extra work, or even
a complete site redesign.

11. Designing for Mobile Devices
o Create a mobile version of your site
 Allow zooming
 Provide link to the full site
 Hiding of affordances is a no-no
 Make your links go to the designated
location not to the homepage
 No cursor=no hover=no clue
 Be learnable and memorable
o Test usability on mobile

12. Brain Rules
At first I was trying to find a link from Brain Rules to Don’t
Make Me Think and couldn’t find one. Then I stopped and
realized there were so many ways to link the topics in Brain
Rules to this book. Attention, memory, vision and sensory
integration are the ones that stuck out most to me. The noise
that Krug talks about eliminating affects our senses through
out vision. The distractions that come from disorganization,
clutter, and overstimulation can cause our attention to move
away from the website we are on and ruin the experience. To
finish this off we always remember a bad website and try to
avoid that site at all costs.