"Don’t Make Me Think"

Interesting comparison, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (see previous Blog posting) to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Krug is a noted expert on web usability, and writes about website design. His major tenet is that whatever a user does online, should be self-evident. Links should look like links, buttons should look like buttons, search and other features of the web page should be obvious, and words should be provided sparingly. As a user, you should always know where you are, what the most important items on a web page are, and what options you have for links.

Krug reinforces what Carr said, but comes from a very different perspective. Krug is interested in getting users to what they’re interested in as quickly as possible. He accepts that users aren’t on the web to think, and he’s OK with that: in fact, he supports it! He likens web users to people rushing by highway billboard signs at 100 km/h – they don’t have much time to process the visual message with which you’re presenting them, so you’d better make sure the page design uses a clear visual hierarchy, follows expected conventions, is broken up into clearly-defined areas, has no visual noise or distractions, and makes clickable links obvious and immediately recognizable. He knows you’re skimming for information and therefore won’t be on this site for long, and designs the site accordingly.

I am fascinated by his ideas on page design, and know from experience as both a user of the internet and a designer of web pages that they work. What appals me, however, are the assumptions upon which this line of thinking is based: users are only passing through your site on their way to somewhere else. They’ll take what they need, and then leave – likely within about 30 seconds. This, along with the ideas developed much more fully in Carr’s book, indicate to me that the web is not the best place for learning to occur.

What encourages me is that, although the web doesn’t appear to be the most effective place for learning to occur, it can be an excellent vehicle through which thought-provoking content can be delivered for consumption offline, or by which effective learner-to-learner interactions can occur. My take-home message from Krug is how to lay out my web pages to make it easy for a learner to get what they need. The message I got from Carr is that the real thinking and learning is going to have to occur offline, away from the internet. A challenge I still need to resolve: how to utilize tools available to me as an online course developer (such as synchronous discussions and wikis) to capture the rich interaction I find to be one of the best parts about the experience in the face-to-face classroom environment.

Reference

Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.