Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a great book, not only for what it contains, but for what it does not contain.

At a couple hundred pages (most of which are filled with large graphics), Krug is forced to be concise in order to deliver his message. There is no room for irrelevant data in so little text. Happily for the reader, he succeeds brilliantly.

“Don’t Make Me Think” is not just the title of this book - It is the single most important point Krug makes about web usability design.

Throughout the book, he emphasizes that a good user interface should be self-evident. A user seeing a web page for the first time should not have to wonder what the page is for or how to use it.

He provides many examples to illustrate his points – most from actual web sites. Krug holds up Amazon.com as an example of a site that is doing many things right, making itself intuitive for the users. It’s tough to argue this point, given Amazon’s success and enormous growth over the years.

According to Krug, most web designers make the mistake of assuming that visitors to their site will read everything on each page presented to them. The reality is that most visitors quickly scan a page, searching for anything that looks relevant to them. When they find something that seems useful and clickable, they click it. When they actually find something useful, they stop looking.

Because of this behavior, web designers should focus on simplifying their page layout and draw the reader’s eye to the most important parts of the page that support the most common activities. They should provide clear, self-evident labels for the items on their pages: there should be no confusion what each item is for and what will happen if a user clicks on it or otherwise interacts with it.

But following his design advice is not sufficient. Krug also recommends recruiting and observing testers to use your web design. Watch how they interact with the pages; note the pages that they struggle to learn; document unexpected behavior.  A designer does not always think like an end user and users often react in unexpected ways. This type of testing is a good way to learn how end users perceive and interact with your site.

Check out this book if you want a quick way to improve the usability of your web sites.