Don’t Make Me Think – Complete Book Summary & All Key Ideas

Don’t Make Me Think: A Complete Guide to Web Usability

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited is the definitive guide to web usability, packed with common-sense advice that has shaped a generation of designers, developers, and product managers. It’s a short, witty, and intensely practical book built on a simple but powerful premise: a website or app should be so clear that using it requires no real thought at all.

This summary breaks down every core principle, guiding framework, and practical takeaway from Krug’s classic. We will cover how users actually behave online, why most arguments about design are a waste of time, and how you can implement simple, effective usability testing—even with no budget. Consider this your complete guide to making digital products that are not just functional, but intuitive, considerate, and a genuine pleasure to use.

Chapter 1: Don’t make me think!

This chapter introduces the single most important principle of usability: stop making users think. When you design anything, from a website to a mobile app, your goal should be to make it so obvious that no one has to pause to figure it out.

Krug’s First Law of Usability

The foundational rule is “Don’t make me think!” This isn’t just a catchy phrase; it’s the ultimate tie-breaker in any design decision. When a user looks at a web page, it should be self-evident and self-explanatory. They should be able to “get it” instantly—what the site is, and how to use it—without any mental effort.

When a page doesn’t make users think, their internal monologue is simple: “Okay, there’s the navigation. That’s a link. And there’s the thing I want.” But when a page forces them to think, their mind is filled with question marks: “Is that clickable? What does ‘Job-o-Rama’ mean? Where did they put the search bar?” Your job as a creator is to eliminate the question marks.

Things That Make Us Think

Many common design choices unnecessarily add to a user’s cognitive workload, which is the mental effort required to use a site. The more you make users think, the more you erode their confidence and goodwill.

Common culprits include:

Clever or confusing names: Using a cute or marketing-driven name like “Job-o-Rama” instead of the obvious “Jobs” forces users to stop and wonder. Always skew toward the obvious.
Ambiguous links and buttons: Users should never have to wonder if something is clickable. Every hesitation, no matter how small, adds up and creates a frustrating experience.
Unclear organization: When a user asks, “Where am I?” or “Where should I begin?” you have failed to provide a clear path.

You Can’t Make Everything Self-Evident

While the goal is to make every page self-evident, sometimes the concept you’re presenting is new, complex, or groundbreaking. In these cases, you should aim for the next best thing: making it self-explanatory. This means it might take a moment of thought to understand, but the design, layout, and carefully chosen text should guide the user to an effortless understanding. The rule is simple: if you can’t make it self-evident, at least make it self-explanatory.

This chapter establishes that clarity is the foundation of good usability. By removing mental roadblocks and making every interaction as intuitive as possible, you create an effortless experience that feels good to users and keeps them coming back.

Chapter 2: How we really use the Web

To design effective websites, you must first abandon your idealized vision of how people use them. We imagine users carefully reading our content and weighing their options. The reality is far more chaotic. This chapter breaks down the three fundamental facts of real-world web use.

FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them.

With very few exceptions, people don’t read web pages word-for-word. They scan for words and phrases that catch their eye. Just like a dog only hearing its name in a long speech, users filter out most of the content on a page, focusing only on what seems relevant to their mission.

We scan for three main reasons:

We’re on a mission: Most of the time, we’re trying to get something done quickly and don’t have time for unnecessary reading.
We know we don’t need to read everything: We’re only interested in a fraction of what’s on the page and have learned that scanning is the most efficient way to find the relevant bits.
We’re good at it: We’ve been scanning newspapers, magazines, and social media feeds our whole lives. It’s a well-honed skill.

FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.

When faced with a set of options, users don’t carefully evaluate each one to find the best choice. Instead, they choose the first reasonable option they see. This strategy is called satisficing—a combination of “satisfying” and “sufficing.” As soon as a user finds a link that seems like it might lead to what they’re looking for, they click it.

Why do we satisfice?

We’re usually in a hurry: Optimizing takes time, while satisficing is more efficient.
There’s no real penalty for guessing wrong: A wrong click usually just costs a click of the Back button.
Weighing options might not help: On poorly designed sites, guessing is often just as effective as careful consideration.
Guessing is more fun: It’s less work and offers the chance of a pleasant surprise.

FACT OF LIFE #3: We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.

Most people use technology without a full understanding of how it works. We forge ahead, making up our own stories about what we’re doing and why it works. It’s not a lack of intelligence; it’s a lack of caring. As long as we can use something to get a task done, we don’t feel the need to understand its inner workings.

If we find something that works—no matter how inefficient—we tend to stick with it. We rarely look for a better way unless we stumble upon it. While muddling through can sometimes work, it’s often inefficient and error-prone. A user who “gets it” is far more likely to find what they’re looking for, understand your site’s full value, and feel smart and in control, which encourages them to return.

These three facts paint a picture of a user who is hurried, impatient, and focused on accomplishing a goal with minimal effort. Your design challenge is to cater to this reality. If users are going to treat your site like a billboard they’re speeding past, your job is to design a really great billboard.

Chapter 3: Billboard Design 101

If users are just glancing at your pages, you need to design for quick comprehension. This chapter outlines how to create pages that communicate their purpose and structure at a glance, just like a well-designed billboard.

Embrace Conventions as Your Friends

Conventions are widely used or standardized design patterns that users already understand. Examples include putting the logo in the top-left corner, having a shopping cart icon in the top-right, and using blue, underlined text for links. Conventions are your friends because they make a site easier to grasp in a hurry—users don’t have to waste time figuring out how things work.

Designers are often tempted to reinvent the wheel to be creative, but this is a mistake unless your new idea is demonstrably better. The rule is: innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t. And remember, clarity trumps consistency. If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent with the rest of your site, choose clarity.

Build a Clear Visual Hierarchy

A good visual hierarchy uses visual cues to communicate the relationships between elements on a page. It tells the user what’s important, what’s related, and what’s part of something else—all before they read a single word.

A page with a clear visual hierarchy has three traits:

The more important something is, the more prominent it is. Important elements are larger, bolder, or set off by more white space.
Things that are logically related are visually related. Group similar items together under a heading or display them in the same style.
Things are “nested” visually to show what’s part of what. A section heading should span all the items within that section.

Break Up Pages into Clearly Defined Areas

Dividing a page into distinct sections helps users quickly decide which areas to focus on and which to ignore. Eye-tracking studies show that users rapidly identify the most useful parts of a page and then almost completely ignore the rest. This allows them to process information more efficiently.

Make It Obvious What’s Clickable

Since users are constantly looking for the next thing to click, it’s crucial to make it obvious what’s interactive. Use familiar visual cues like button shapes, specific colors for text links, and placement in a navigation bar. Users should never have to guess whether something is a link.

Eliminate Distractions

One of the greatest enemies of clarity is visual noise. This comes in three forms:

Shouting: When too many elements clamor for attention with bright colors and loud text, the page becomes overwhelming.
Disorganization: A page that looks like a ransacked room is hard to scan. Using a grid to align elements is critical.
Clutter: Too much stuff on a page makes it hard to find what’s important. Start with the assumption that everything is noise and get rid of anything that isn’t making a real contribution.

Format Text to Support Scanning

Because users scan text, formatting is key to readability.

Use plenty of headings: They act as an informal outline and help users find the sections they care about.
Keep paragraphs short: Long paragraphs are daunting. Break them up, even into single sentences.
Use bulleted lists: Almost any series of items can and should be a bulleted list.
Highlight key terms: Bolding important words and phrases makes them pop out during a scan.

By applying these billboard design principles, you create pages that can be understood in a flash, catering directly to the way users actually consume the web.

Chapter 4: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

This chapter focuses on the nature of choices online and introduces a second law of usability. The key is not to minimize the number of clicks, but to make each click an effortless, obvious decision.

Mindless Choices are Good Choices

Web designers have long debated the ideal number of clicks to get to a destination. The “three-click rule” suggested users would give up if they couldn’t find something in three clicks. However, Krug argues this is a flawed metric.

Krug’s Second Law of Usability is: “It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.”

Users don’t mind a lot of clicks if each one is painless and gives them confidence they are on the right track. This is often called following the “scent of information.” A clear link gives off a strong scent, assuring the user they are getting closer to their goal. An ambiguous link has a weak scent and creates uncertainty. The rule of thumb is that three mindless clicks are better than one click that requires thought.

The game Twenty Questions provides a perfect example. The opening question—”Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”—is a mindless choice. It requires almost no thought to answer correctly and confidently move forward. Your goal in web design should be to create choices that are just as clear.

Help Me When Choices are Hard

Sometimes, you can’t avoid presenting a complex choice. In these situations, you need to provide just enough guidance at the right moment. This guidance should be:

Brief: The smallest amount of information needed to help.
Timely: Placed so the user sees it exactly when they need it.
Unavoidable: Formatted so it can’t be missed.

A great real-world example is the “LOOK RIGHT” or “LOOK LEFT” painted on the streets in London to help tourists avoid looking the wrong way for traffic. This simple, timely, and unavoidable instruction has saved countless lives. On the web, this could be a small “What’s this?” link next to a confusing form field or a brief tip that appears at just the right moment.

The core lesson is that successful navigation is not about the number of clicks, but about the clarity of each decision. By designing mindless choices, you reduce cognitive load, build user confidence, and create a smooth, frictionless path to what they’re looking for.

Chapter 5: Omit Needless Words

Drawing on the classic advice from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, this chapter explains why cutting down on text is one of the most effective ways to improve a website’s usability.

Krug’s Third Law of Usability

Most of the words on a typical web page are just taking up space. No one reads them, but their presence makes a page feel more daunting than it needs to be. This leads to Krug’s Third Law: “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.”

This may sound extreme, but it’s a realistic goal. Trimming text has several benefits:

It reduces the noise level of the page.
It makes the useful content more prominent.
It makes pages shorter, allowing users to see more at a glance without scrolling.

Happy Talk Must Die

Happy talk is the introductory, content-free text that’s supposed to welcome users to a site and tell them how great it is. It’s the web equivalent of small talk, but users online are in a hurry and want to get straight to the point. You can identify happy talk by the tiny voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah, blah, blah…” as you read it. It’s often found on home pages (“Welcome to our site!”) and section front pages. It adds zero value and should be eliminated.

Instructions Must Die

The other major source of needless words is instructions. The reality is that no one reads instructions. Users prefer to muddle through on their own and will only look for instructions as a last resort. Even then, they will only scan them.

Your goal should be to make everything self-explanatory, eliminating the need for instructions entirely. If instructions are absolutely necessary, they should be cut down to the bare minimum. Be aggressive in your pruning—a short, scannable list is far more effective than a dense paragraph.

By ruthlessly omitting needless words, you create a cleaner, more focused, and more usable experience. Users can find what they need faster because there’s less clutter to get in their way.

Chapter 6: Street signs and Breadcrumbs

This chapter dives deep into navigation design, arguing that people won’t use a site if they can’t find their way around. Good navigation is not just a feature; it’s the foundation of a usable website.

The Unbearable Lightness of Browsing

Browsing the web feels like moving through a physical space, but it’s missing key orientation cues. There is no sense of scale (how big is this site?), no sense of direction (there’s no left or right), and no sense of location (you can’t form a mental map). This is why we are so dependent on navigation elements—they compensate for our inherent “lost in space” feeling.

Good navigation serves several overlooked purposes:

It tells us what’s on the site by making the content hierarchy visible.
It teaches us how to use the site by showing us where to start and what our options are.
It builds confidence in the people who built the site by demonstrating that they are competent and organized.

Persistent Navigation and Its Components

Persistent navigation (or global navigation) is the set of elements that appear on every page of a site. It provides a constant sense of orientation and familiarity.

The essential elements of persistent navigation are:

Site ID (Logo): This is the “building name” of the site. It should be in the top-left corner and always link back to the home page.
Sections (Primary Navigation): These are the links to the main sections of the site, representing the top level of the hierarchy.
Utilities: These are links to important functions that aren’t part of the content hierarchy, like “Sign In,” “Help,” or “Shopping Cart.” They should be less prominent than the Sections.
A way to search: Every page should have a search box, especially on larger sites. Stick to a simple box, a button labeled “Go,” and the word “Search” or a magnifying glass icon. Avoid adding complex options.

You Are Here, Page Names, and Breadcrumbs

To help users understand their location, you need several types of “street signs”:

Page Names: Every page needs a prominent name, and that name must match the link the user clicked to get there. This confirms they’ve arrived in the right place.
“You Are Here” Indicators: Your current location should be clearly highlighted in all navigation menus. Don’t make the highlighting too subtle; it needs to be obvious.
Breadcrumbs: These show the path from the home page to your current location (e.g., Home > Books > Fiction > Science Fiction). They take up little space and make it easy to move back up the site’s hierarchy. The last item in a breadcrumb trail should be bold and not a link, as it represents the current page.

The Trunk Test

The ultimate test of your site’s navigation is the trunk test. Imagine being blindfolded, locked in a car trunk, driven around, and then dumped on a random page of a website. When you open your eyes, you should be able to answer these questions instantly:

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?

If a user can answer these questions without thinking, your navigation is doing its job.

Chapter 7: The Big Bang Theory of Web Design

The home page is the most critical page on a site. It’s where you have to make a good first impression and orient users correctly. This chapter explains how to design a home page that gets people off on the right foot.

The Big Bang Theory of Web Design

Your home page needs to answer four fundamental questions for a first-time visitor, and it needs to do so at a glance:

What is this? (What kind of site is it?)
What can I do here? (What are its features?)
What do they have here? (What is its content?)
Why should I be here—and not somewhere else? (What is the value proposition?)

Being able to answer these questions instantly is crucial. This is Krug’s Big Bang Theory of Web Design: the first few seconds a user spends on your site are critical because they form an initial impression that colors everything else they experience. If they start out confused, they will likely get even more confused. If they “get it” right away, they are much more likely to have a successful visit.

How to Get the Message Across

Even though users may land on any page, the home page is still the place they go to get their bearings. There are three key places on the page where users expect to find explicit statements about your site:

The Tagline: This is a pithy phrase that appears next to the logo and sums up what the site is and what makes it great. A good tagline is clear, informative, and differentiates you from the competition. “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is a classic example. Don’t confuse a tagline with a motto (e.g., “We bring good things to life”), which is less descriptive.
The Welcome Blurb: This is a short description of the site, prominently displayed on the home page. It should be concise and get straight to the point—not a fluffy mission statement.
The “Learn More” Video: For innovative or complex products, a short explanatory video can be an effective way to communicate your value proposition quickly.

The Fifth Question: Where Do I Start?

Once a user understands what your site is, the home page must clearly answer the fifth question: Where do I start? The primary entry points—like search, browsing categories, or a “Sign In” button—should be obvious and stand out from the promotional clutter.

Avoid the Tragedy of the Commons

The home page is the most valuable real estate on a website, and every stakeholder wants a piece of it. This often leads to a “tragedy of the commons,” where the page becomes so cluttered with promotions that its overall effectiveness is destroyed. The benefit of adding one more promo goes to one department, while the cost (a more confusing page) is shared by everyone. It requires constant vigilance to protect the home page from this kind of overload.

A successful home page is a delicate balance, but its primary job is to provide clarity and a clear starting point. If you fail at that, nothing else matters.

Chapter 8: “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends”

This chapter addresses a common dysfunction in web teams: endless, unproductive arguments about usability. Krug explains why these “religious debates” happen and how to put a stop to them.

Why Teams Argue

Most arguments about web design are not based on data, but on strongly held personal beliefs. These debates are fueled by several factors:

Everyone has an opinion: Because we are all web users, we all have strong feelings about what we like and dislike. We then project these personal preferences onto all users, assuming “everybody likes” what we like.
Different professional perspectives: Team members have different priorities based on their roles. Designers want sites that look great. Developers want sites with elegant, ingenious features. Business stakeholders want to promote whatever will drive revenue. These conflicting viewpoints naturally lead to clashes.
The myth of the Average User: Teams often try to resolve stalemates by figuring out what the “Average User” wants. The problem is, there is no Average User. All web users are unique, and their behavior is idiosyncratic. Good design is not about finding a one-size-fits-all answer; it’s about creating something that works well in a specific context for a specific audience.

The Antidote for Religious Debates

You can’t win a religious debate with logic. The only way to move past arguments about what people like is to shift the conversation to what works. And there is only one way to find out what works: testing.

Usability testing is the antidote to religious debates.

When you watch real people try to use your site, the arguments stop. The focus moves from subjective opinions to objective observations. Testing doesn’t tell you what’s “right” or “wrong” in an abstract sense; it shows you whether this design, with this wording, in this context, creates a good experience for your users. It replaces unproductive arguments with actionable insights and breaks the gridlock that stalls so many projects.

Chapter 9: Usability testing on 10 cents a day

This chapter provides a practical, no-nonsense guide to conducting your own usability tests. Krug argues that you don’t need a big budget or a fancy lab—just a simple, repeatable process.

Focus Groups are Not Usability Tests

It’s crucial to understand the difference. A focus group is a discussion where people talk about their opinions and feelings. A usability test is about watching one person at a time try to actually use something to accomplish specific tasks. Focus groups are for finding out what people want; usability tests are for finding out if they can use what you’ve built.

Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing

The core idea is simple: watch people use your site and note where they get stuck. Krug advocates for a “discount” approach that makes testing accessible to everyone.

Key principles for do-it-yourself testing:

A morning a month is all you need: Test with three users in one morning, then debrief over lunch. This simple, fixed schedule ensures testing actually gets done.
Three users are enough: You don’t need a large sample size. The goal is not to prove a hypothesis, but to find and fix problems. Three users will almost always reveal the most serious issues. You will find more problems than you have time to fix.
Recruit loosely and grade on a curve: Don’t get hung up on finding the “perfect” participants. It’s better to test with almost anyone than to not test at all. You can make allowances for the differences between your test participants and your target audience.
Make it a spectator sport: The most valuable part of testing is its effect on observers. Encourage everyone—team members, stakeholders, and executives—to watch the tests. Seeing a user struggle is a transformative experience that builds empathy and consensus.

The Testing Process

A typical one-hour test session includes:

Welcome (4 mins): Explain that you’re testing the site, not them, and encourage them to think out loud.
Questions (2 mins): Ask a few questions about their web habits to put them at ease.
Home page tour (3 mins): Ask them to look at the home page and describe their initial impressions.
Tasks (35 mins): This is the core of the test. Watch them try to perform several typical tasks. Your job is to stay quiet and only prompt them to keep thinking aloud.
Probing (5 mins): Ask follow-up questions about anything you observed.
Wrapping up (5 mins): Thank them, pay them, and show them out.

The Debriefing: Deciding What to Fix

After the tests, the team should debrief to decide what to fix. The process is:

Make a collective list of the most serious problems observed.
Choose the top 10 most serious issues.
Create an ordered list of fixes, starting with the worst problems first.
Focus ruthlessly on fixing the most serious problems first. Don’t get distracted by low-hanging fruit or “kayak problems” (where a user goes astray but quickly recovers).

Regular, simple testing is the single best thing you can do to improve your product. It replaces guesswork with evidence and ensures you’re building something that people can actually use.

Chapter 10: Mobile: It’s not just a city in Alabama anymore

The rise of mobile devices has introduced new usability challenges, primarily centered around what Krug calls the “itty-bitty living space.” This chapter explores how to apply usability principles to small screens.

It’s All About Tradeoffs

Designing for mobile is an exercise in making smart tradeoffs. The most significant constraint is the small screen size, which forces you to be ruthless about what you include and how you display it. The cardinal rule is: managing real estate challenges shouldn’t be done at the cost of usability.

Breeding Chameleons: Responsive Design

The ideal solution for multiple screen sizes is responsive design, where a single site adapts its layout to fit any screen. While it can be a lot of work to do well, it’s now a necessity.

Key considerations for responsive sites:

Allow zooming: If you can’t create a fully responsive site, at least don’t prevent users from zooming in on a desktop version.
Don’t block deep links: When a user clicks a link to a specific article, don’t just dump them on the mobile home page. Take them to the content they wanted.
Always provide a link to the “full” site: Some users will always prefer the desktop version, even on a mobile device.

The Challenge of Affordances

Affordances are the visual clues that suggest how an object can be used (e.g., a button that looks “pressable”). These are harder to convey on mobile for two reasons:

No cursor means no hover: Many desktop designs rely on hover states to indicate clickability or reveal information. Since touch screens don’t have a cursor, these interactions don’t exist. You must find other ways to communicate what’s interactive.
Flat design can obscure cues: The trend toward Flat design has removed many of the textures, shadows, and borders that create affordances. While it can look clean, it can also make it difficult to distinguish between what’s interactive and what’s not. You must compensate by using other visual dimensions like color, placement, and typography.

Mobile Apps: Delightful, Learnable, and Memorable

In the competitive app market, usability has a few extra dimensions:

Delightful: A delightful app is fun, surprising, or even “magical.” It goes beyond mere functionality to create an enjoyable experience.
Learnable: Apps with innovative gestures or complex features need to be easy to learn. A quick tour or a simple tutorial is essential, but it must be effective.
Memorable: Once a user learns how to use an app, will they remember how the next time? If an app requires relearning every time, it’s likely to be abandoned.

Mobile Usability Testing

The process for testing on mobile devices is the same as on a desktop, but the logistics can be tricky. Krug recommends using a document camera or a custom rig (his “Brundlefly” camera) to capture not just the screen but also the user’s finger gestures. Seeing how a user taps and swipes provides crucial context that a simple screen recording misses.

Mobile design presents unique constraints, but the fundamental principles of usability remain the same. The key is to make smart tradeoffs that prioritize clarity and ease of use, even in an “itty-bitty living space.”

Chapter 11: Usability as common courtesy

Good usability isn’t just about making things clear; it’s about being considerate of the user. This chapter introduces the concept of a “reservoir of goodwill” and explains why your website should behave like a mensch—a person of integrity and honor.

The Reservoir of Goodwill

Every time a user visits your site, they start with a reservoir of goodwill. This reservoir is finite. Every problem they encounter—a broken link, a confusing instruction, a hidden piece of information—lowers the level. If you deplete it entirely, they will leave, frustrated and unlikely to return.

However, you can also refill the reservoir. When you do things that are helpful and considerate, you earn back their goodwill. The goal is to keep the reservoir as full as possible by minimizing frustration and maximizing helpfulness.

Things That Diminish Goodwill

These are the actions that make users feel you don’t have their best interests at heart:

Hiding information they want: Making it hard to find customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, or prices feels deceptive and instantly erodes trust.
Punishing them for not doing things your way: Forcing users to format data in a specific way (e.g., entering a phone number without dashes) is lazy and user-hostile.
Asking for information you don’t really need: Every unnecessary field in a form raises suspicion and causes annoyance.
Shucking and jiving: Fake sincerity is easy to spot. Phrases like “Your call is important to us” often feel disingenuous.
Putting sizzle in their way: Forcing users to wade through marketing fluff and stock photos when they’re in a hurry shows you don’t respect their time.
Having a site that looks amateurish: A sloppy, disorganized site suggests a lack of care and professionalism.

Things That Increase Goodwill

These actions show users that you are looking out for them and can help repair any damage done:

Make the main things they want to do obvious and easy.
Tell them what they want to know upfront, especially about costs and potential problems.
Save them steps wherever you can, like providing a direct link to a shipping tracker instead of just a number.
Put effort into it. A well-organized, accurate, and comprehensive support section shows you care about helping them solve problems.
Answer their likely questions in a candid and up-to-date FAQ section.
Provide creature comforts like printer-friendly pages.
Make it easy to recover from errors.
When in doubt, apologize. If you can’t do what a user wants, at least acknowledge the inconvenience.

Ultimately, usability as common courtesy is about treating users with respect. A site that acts like a mensch builds trust, loyalty, and a positive brand perception.

Chapter 12: Accessibility and you

You cannot have a truly usable website unless it is accessible to people with disabilities. This chapter frames accessibility not as a technical checklist, but as a moral imperative.

It’s the Right Thing to Do

While there are many arguments for accessibility (it’s the law, it’s good for SEO, it benefits everyone), Krug argues that there’s really only one that matters: it’s the right thing to do. The web has the power to dramatically improve the lives of people with disabilities—for example, by allowing a blind person to read any newspaper on their own. As creators, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to make that possible.

The Four Things You Can Do Right Now

Making a site fully accessible can seem daunting, but you don’t have to be an expert to make a huge impact. Krug recommends focusing on four key areas:

Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone: If your site is confusing to the average user, it will be even more confusing for someone using assistive technology. Start by making your site clear and logical for all users. This is the single most effective thing you can do for accessibility.
Read an article: Read the article “Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites” by Mary Theofanos and Ginny Redish. It explains how blind users actually use screen readers and will give you a profound appreciation for the problems you are trying to solve.
Read a book: Once you have some context, read a book on the topic, like A Web for Everyone by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery.
Go for the low-hanging fruit: Implement a few basic technical fixes that have the biggest impact. These include:
- Add appropriate alt text to every image.
- Use headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) correctly to create a logical document structure.
- Make your forms work with screen readers by using the <label> element.
- Put a “Skip to Main Content” link at the beginning of each page.
- Make all content accessible via the keyboard.
- Ensure there is significant contrast between text and background colors.

Accessibility is not an “extra” feature; it’s a fundamental part of good design. By focusing on these core practices, you can make your site usable for everyone without getting overwhelmed.

Chapter 13: Guide for the perplexed

This final chapter offers practical advice for how to champion usability within your organization, especially when you feel like you’re the only one who cares.

How to Make Usability Happen Where You Live

The field has evolved from “Usability” to the broader umbrella of “User Experience (UX),” but the challenge of getting buy-in remains. While traditional advice suggests showing ROI or learning to speak “business,” Krug offers a more direct, human-centered approach.

If you want to convince your organization to take usability seriously, here’s what to do:

Get your boss (and their boss) to watch a usability test: This is the single most effective tactic. Seeing a real user struggle with your product is a powerful, unforgettable experience that cuts through corporate-speak and builds instant empathy. If they can’t come in person, show them short video clips of the highlights.
Do the first one on your own time: Don’t ask for permission. Keep it simple, informal, and free. Test an easy target, fix a real problem, and then publicize the improvement.
Test the competition: Everyone loves learning about the competition. It’s a great, non-threatening way to introduce the value of testing.
Empathize with management: Apply your user-advocate empathy to your bosses. Understand their pressures and constraints. This can build bridges and make them more receptive to your ideas.

Resist the Dark Forces

As a user advocate, your job is to serve users, not manipulate them. There is a growing trend to use usability research to figure out how to trick people into doing things they don’t want to do (e.g., signing up for newsletters with hidden, pre-checked boxes). This is not your job. Persuading users is fine; deceiving them is not. The users are counting on you to be their voice.

A Few Definitive Answers

While most usability questions depend on context, a few rules are universal:

Don’t use small, low-contrast type. Ever.
Don’t put labels inside form fields unless you can do it perfectly without compromising accessibility or clarity.
Preserve the distinction between visited and unvisited links.
Don’t float headings between paragraphs; they should always be closer to the text that follows them.

Ultimately, building usable products is about empathy, clarity, and a commitment to doing good work. It’s a challenging but rewarding endeavor, and even getting it half right is a major accomplishment.

Key Takeaways

The Core Lessons:

Don’t Make Me Think: The central principle of usability is to make every interaction so simple and obvious that it requires no thought. Eliminate question marks and reduce cognitive load.
Design for How People Actually Behave: Users scan, satisfice, and muddle through. They don’t read carefully or make optimal choices. Design for this reality.
Testing is the Antidote to Arguments: The only way to know what works is to watch real people use your product. Regular, simple usability testing replaces subjective opinions with objective evidence.
Usability is Common Courtesy: Beyond functionality, a good product is considerate. Build up a reservoir of goodwill by respecting users’ time and intelligence.

Next Actions:

Conduct a “Trunk Test” on your own site. Pick a random page and see if you can instantly identify the site ID, page name, sections, your location, and how to search.
Schedule your first usability test. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Grab three people, give them a few tasks, and watch what happens. You’ll learn more in one morning than in weeks of internal debate.
Ruthlessly edit your content. Go to any page on your site and try to cut half the words, then half again. Focus on eliminating “happy talk” and unnecessary instructions.

Reflection Prompts:

What is the one thing on my site or in my app that I know is confusing, but my team has been arguing about instead of fixing?
If a first-time user landed on my home page, would they understand what my product is and where to start in under five seconds?
Am I designing for an idealized user, or am I truly designing for the hurried, scanning user who just wants to get something done?