Don't Make Me Think notes+response.

A lot of the reading for Don’t Make Me Think covered areas that I had previous thought about or at least made sense when reading. I fully believe that most people don’t look intently at websites or their design. It was funny to think about, but most people will struggle accomplishing tasks one way, even though it may be a more difficult way to complete any given task, the user will most likely keep to the method that they know, never seeming to stray. That is definitely something that I noticed that I do, especially with features in programs when they change, I tend to not want them to change, I like the way that they are…but in the same breath, I also do enjoy when new features or surprises are added. I now also feel a bit better when I see other horribly designed websites and realize that the designer just didn’t think about its impact.

notes:

chapter 1
*don’t aim to make everything extremely understandable to get through
*people will spend more time on a website than is thought, tending to blame themselves over the website design
*try to use easy-to-understand/recognizable names for sections
*self-evident vs self-explanatory
*self-evident: just by looking at the page, the user realizes and knows what they need to do
*self-explanatory: the slightly longer realization of what to do on the website or webpage.
*This can be the name change of a section or different placement of links or navigation

chapter 2
*to design for the web you need to keep in mind 3 statements
*“we don’t read pages, we scan them.”
*We’ve been learning to scan various documents+forms our whole life, the web is just a natural progression that way.
*“we don’t make optimal choices. we sacrifice”
*we’re bound to choose wrong.
*there’s not much harm in being wrong on the internet when navigating.
*“we don’t figure out how things work. we muddle through.”
*people don’t tend to read the instructions that they’re given
*we don’t look for new ways to work, we stick to the old, even if it’s time-consuming
*design like the users you’re aiming for

chapter 3
*five things to keep in mind
*create a clear visual hierarchy (think about newspapers + their sections + layouts)
*take advantage of conventions (a lot of the style of websites in general comes form newspapers + magazines. designers tend to avoid conventions + they should embrace them)
*break pages into clearly defined areas (choose easy to organize sections/headlines)
*make it obvious what’s clickable (if you don’t differentiate links from text, users may not know there's stuff to explore)
*minimize noise (don’t be too busy in layout with background or text or everything. be simple and concise)