How do you envision the way people use your website? According to Steve Krug, web designers think “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), but users think “billboard going by at 60 miles an hour.”
The notion above comes from Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. There’s a chapter called “How we really use the web” on his site, Advanced Common Sense. It’s sobering reading if you’re a designer, but probably a lot closer to how people do use the web. Some of his other points:
- We don’t read web pages. We scan them.
- We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.*
- We don’t figure things out. We muddle through.
Problem is, designers are people who DO like to figure things out.
This chapter is well worth a look. There are powerful implications for my career field, radio, which I’ll explore in different blog post.
*Satisfice was coined by economist Herbert Simon as a cross between “satisfying” and “sufficing” in Models of Man: Social and Rational (Wiley, 1957).
cleve callison’s blog 
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