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Don’t make me think: Designing products that eliminate question marks
Revisiting 7 principles from Steve Krug’s common sense approach to web and mobile usability.
In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman gave us the famous example of the intended simplicity of doors. It’s likely that many of us are familiar with this analogy, as most introductions to user experience rarely miss an opportunity to name drop the concept.
In a nutshell: Doors are simple, and whenever I interact with one in the real world I should understand how to use it. I turn knobs, I push plates, I pull or slide handles depending on the door’s design. And any failure in this logic equals a failure in the design, or implementation.
The root point being: Doors should not require instructions. Bad interactions, in both physical and virtual worlds, create obstacles between a person and a thing—between a user and an interface—like a push door that you keep mistakenly pulling by the handle.
