Don't Make Me Think, Revisited summary

Imagine visiting a website with the following text on the home page: “Welcome to XYZ Corporation! We provide world-class clients with innovative products and customizable solutions...”

We’re all familiar with this sort of promotional corporate jargon and yet, we never read it.

Visiting a new website is somewhat like walking into an unfamiliar supermarket, with one major difference: online, you can’t walk around and look down every aisle. This presents a challenge.

Because if you don’t find what you’re looking for or don’t understand how a website is organized, your option to leave (and never come back) is just a click away.

If you live in the United States but have driven a car in London (where they drive on the left), then you know exactly how confusing it can be when conventions are broken.

And that’s exactly why you should embrace conventions when you’re designing a website.

When you follow a link from Twitter or Facebook, you often end up landing deep inside a website. But when you want to figure out where you’ve ended up and decide whether you should trust the site’s content, you often head to the site’s home page.

Since the home page plays such a crucial role, designing a perfect example is almost impossible. Everyone on your team will have an opinion!

So your website should be easy to understand and navigate. But how do you ensure that your final product actually fulfills these goals? You might think to ask your friends, or simply trust your own judgment.

Unfortunately, you can’t rely solely on your own judgment. After all, you’ve built the website, so its awesome features and usability flows are obvious to you. It’s impossible to be objective!

Although testing is necessary, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to most people. That’s why you should be sure to offer compensation or special treats to test subjects (developers are particularly fond of pizza, for example) to ensure as many people as possible will test your site.

Your website should be understandable to anyone regardless of background, so don’t worry about selecting subjects only from your target audience. Any sort of person will do; just remember to reward your testers for their help – by paying them for their time.

Many web development teams avoid testing because they assume that testing involves a lot of time, money and expertise. But that’s not the case.

After all, you don’t need to test hundreds of people. You’re not conducting a scientific study, or trying to produce statistically significant results; you’re simply trying to inform your decision making and understand where people might struggle on your site.

Do you remember the pre-smartphone era? Even then, some cell phones had web browsers, but they were underused. It wasn’t until Apple introduced a touchscreen with swiping and pinching features that mobile browsing became so widespread.

Today, people move faster and read less online; what’s more, they’re more likely to leave a site as soon as they run into a hiccup. Don’t forget that mobile download speeds are unreliable and performance varies widely – so make sure your site loads quickly.