USABILITY (Con't)

Krug states this very well in the following paragraphs on page 15 of his book.

You may be thinking, "Well, it doesn't take much effort to figure out whether something's clickable. If you point the cursor at it, it'll change from an arrow to a pointing hand. What's the big deal?

The point is, when we're using the Web every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting from the task at hand. The distractions may be slight but they add up, and sometimes it doesn't take much to throw us.

As a rule, people don't like to puzzle over how to do things. The fact that the people who built the site didn't care enough to make things obvious -- and easy -- can erode our confidence in the site and its publishers.

Krug also uses the phrase, "mental chatter", to describe the process that takes place while users try to figure out/decipher what the options are that some Web pages give us. Here are a few examples of things that cause "mental chatter".

• How does this site's search engine want me to search?
• Where am I? Where should I begin?
• I can't find what I'm looking for. . . where'd they put it?
• What are the most important things on this page?
• Why did they call it that?

The most important thing for you to remember as a designer is that it is your job to understand the basic principle of removing the question marks. Ideally, you'd like each page to be self-evident so that the average user will know what it is and how to use it. Realistically because you're doing something original or complicated, you have to settle for self-explanatory. A self-explanatory page takes a "little thought" to get it. On a self-explanatory page the following things would work together to create a near instantaneous recognition -- well-chosen names, the page layout, and small amounts of carefully written text.

Krug explains why self-evident pages are important with a the following metaphor:

Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn't make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don't matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiam -- and time (Krug, p. 19).

How we "really" use the Web

One of the biggest problems for designers is the difference between how we "think" people use the Web and "how they use" the Web. We assume users will read all the text, take time to understand how we (the designers) have organized things, and then think about all the options before they (the users) click. What really happens is. . . a user will --

• glance at the page
• scan some (which means a little) of the text, and
• click on the first link thta looks the least little bit like what they're looking for.

Here are some real world Web use facts:

• Users don't read pages. They scan them. "How Users Read on the Web" is a very informative site. Although this site is dealing with Web sites, the information also applies to other interfaces where text, graphics, navigation, and users are involved.
• Users don't make optimal choices. They often don't choose the best option but the first reasonable option and then they click.

Here are the reasons Krug gives that we (Web users) don't look for the best choices --

• We're in a hurry!
• There's not much penalty for clicking or guessing wrong.
• Spending time weighing our options might not improve our chances.
• Guessing is more fun, less work, and if you guess right, it's faster.
• Guessing also introduces an element of chance -- the possibility of running into something surprising and good

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