gravatar image
  • Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  • by Steve Krug
  • Read: Nov 26, 2015
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability book cover

I’m one of those engineers who used to happily claim to not have any frontend skills and just not be good at design. I came to loathe this thinking over the years and decided that if I can’t do something I want to learn at least the basics. This is one of the reasons why I read “Designing for Performance” as mentioned above. Thankfully I also work with a ton of talented designers and one of them is Jessica Harllee. I talked to her about suggestions to get started with learning about design. And she said I should read “Don’t make me think”. And she wasn’t wrong. The book is a wonderful introduction into usability and design. The beauty of it is that while reading it, all of the things mentioned are total no-brainers. But you have to remember it while designing things. The other interesting thing for me was that while all of the examples in the book are web based (with some brief stints into mobile) I could totally think of CLI apps I’ve written in the past that totally do the wrong thing design-wise. Definitely a recommended read.