Book Review: Don't Make Me Think, Revisited.

Abstract

    

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition), by Steve Krug. 2013. New Riders, ISBN: 978–0321965516

With the huge movement of courses to an online format in 2020 that is continuing into 2021, it's a good time to take a look at aspects of the course that are in digital format. This includes course websites, syllabi, and assignments. Ideally, students would be able to navigate these things to find the information they needed quickly and easily without any help from the instructor. In practice, students often get lost in a tangle of hyperlinks, misinterpret directions, and can't find what they need without help. These experiences increase the undesirable difficulty of the course.

Desirable difficulties, a term coined by psychologist Robert Bjork (National Research Council, 1994), are anything that challenges the brain and leads to an increase in long-term retention of information. Undesirable difficulties, on the other hand, are things that take up cognitive space, but do not enhance learning. Undesirable difficulties, such as unclear instructions or a course site that is difficult to navigate, may actually decrease learning because they can disrupt the process of storing information in long-term memory (Chen et al., 2018). We can help decrease undesirable difficulties in courses, particularly in online courses, by providing students a course site that is easy to navigate and assignments with directions that are short and easy to follow. This has the added benefit of reducing the number of emails from students asking where things are on the website or what they are supposed to do in a given assignment!

To get started on making our course sites and assignments easier to navigate, we can look at the information currently available on web usability. Steve Krug, a usability consultant, has an excellent—and relatively short—guide to web usability through proper design. In his book, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited, Krug reviews the basic principles of web design for maximum usability, including mobile design. Although this book was originally published around 2000 and the Revisited (3^rd) edition was published in 2013, the general principles are still highly useful. People still navigate websites in the same way and have become used to certain conventions, like navigation links being either on the top or the left side of the page.

Don't worry, you don't have to know a single line of code to get the full benefit of this book! It's a fast read with plenty of illustrations and examples to explain the points made. It's also full of humor, which definitely helps the points to stick. Krug starts with what he calls his first law of usability: Don't make me think. The design of a website should make where to do and what to do so obvious to the user that they have to use no brainpower to find what they came for. For example, if a student is looking on a course site for an assignment, the link(s) to get there should be so obvious that they can just click, click, click and have their assignment without taking time to hunt for it.

But wait, what if we write instructions on how to find things? People won't read them, Krug says. They'll scan the website, stop on the first word or phrase that looks remotely like what they came for, and muddle their way through until they are either too frustrated to continue or they find what they want. This is why, Krug says, we need to design websites like billboards, with as few words as possible and navigation choices made obvious. Backing up and getting to the home page should also be easy to do. Krug points out that people don't mind clicking several times, as long as the path forward is clear and there's an easy way to back up if they click on the wrong thing. In fact, Krug notes that the Back button is the most frequently used button in a web browser!

After establishing general usability principles, Krug reviews how to apply those principles to a website and check to be sure they are applied correctly. This includes usability testing. Krug points out that usability testing can be done quickly and easily by a few people without any training and should be done often in the process of developing a website. For faculty putting together a course website, whether in a learning management system or through their own webpage, this usability test can be easily done by the course TA or a student or faculty who hasn't seen the course page before. All you have to do is sit them down in front of the course site, give them a few key tasks to do (maybe finding and downloading the syllabus or finding and submitting an assignment), and watch them do it. Have them describe what they're doing as they do it, take note of what they have trouble with, and correct it to improve ease of use. Maybe the syllabus takes too much time to find or the link to upload assignments isn't clearly marked. Things that may be obvious to the course instructor who put the website together may be confusing or difficult for someone who has never interacted with the course site before.

In the Revisited edition, Krug adds some guidelines for mobile use and accessibility. These are great chapters to browse, since many students have poor internet access off-campus and may use a mobile device to access the course website. The course site should be just as accessible and usable on a mobile device as a laptop or desktop. Usability checks should include mobile devices as well. On the topic of accessibility, Krug states that allowing websites to be accessible to people with disabilities usually improve accessibility for everyone. This is a great point and not often made. However, things like larger font size, more separation between sections on a website, and explanations of what images are in alt text improve readability for all, not to mention the alt text explaining what an image is can be useful in situations where the image doesn't load properly.

The same usability principles for websites can be applied to instructions for assignments. Assume students won't carefully read the instructions from beginning to end but will scan them looking for specific pieces of information. Make the instructions as short and to the point as possible, preferably in bullet format rather than paragraph format. Make it easy for them to head in the right direction. Have someone look over the assignment and tell you what they think they're supposed to do. Correct as needed. In short, don't make them think about whether they are doing the assignment correctly. Instead, make them think about the course material, which is what they really should be thinking about in the first place.