Book Report #163 - Don't Make Me Think, Revisited

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) by Steve Krug

This is apparently a very popular book on user experience or UX, formerly known as usability. It's a quick read on glossy pages with lots of pictures, footnotes, and quotations. The writer says early on it was intended to be a quick read that could be done on a few hour plane ride.

I hate to be hard on this book because maybe if I didn't have experience with building apps as a front end developer, it would have been super useful. But because I'm thinking about these issues constantly, it seemed like it was mostly a gloss. It didn't offer anything that deep, and I was really hungry for stuff that wasn't obvious. But maybe that's on me because he does say in the subtitle that it's a common sense approach.

What really surprised me was that he said websites should have concise verbiage. He quoted E.B. White on how to chop what you've written in half, and then start taking stuff out. But his book was full of fluff and nonsense! I know he had to round out his page count with the points he had, but I didn't appreciate it when he was so serious about his points for web pages.

General consensus: The book barely made me think.