Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

The most widely sold web usability book ever written, and it earns the distinction by being short, funny, and relentlessly practical. Krug's central argument is that users do not read pages — they scan them, and every element that requires thought is a cost the designer chose to impose. The book demolished the then-common practice of debating design decisions through opinion by demonstrating that a morning of hallway usability testing reveals more than a month of meetings. Its lasting contribution is not any specific guideline but the attitude it instilled: usability testing can be fast, cheap, and informal, so there is no excuse for not doing it. Twenty-five years later, many teams still do not test with real users, which makes this book's argument as urgent as it was in 2000.