Steve Krug Quotes

#1. A person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it's worth. Take

Steve Krug

#2. When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design.

Steve Krug

#3. When fixing problems, always do the least you can.

Steve Krug

#4. Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.

Steve Krug

#5. In reality, though, most of the time we don't choose the best option - we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.

Steve Krug

#6. I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt.

Steve Krug

#7. You actually can be too rich or too thin

Steve Krug

#8. There's almost always a plausible rationale - and a good, if misguided, intention - behind every usability flaw. Another

Steve Krug

#9. Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.

Steve Krug

#10. The problem is there are no simple "right" answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need - carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

Steve Krug

#11. If you want a great site, you've got to test. After you've worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can't see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

Steve Krug

#12. The general reactions were that the video was either not going to load, or be painfully slow to load, or would require a plug-in users didn't have. YouTube changed that, because it just works.

Steve Krug

#13. As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work.

Steve Krug

#14. Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away.

Steve Krug

#15. The problem is, the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren't shared equally. The section that's being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.

Steve Krug

#16. CLARITY TRUMPS CONSISTENCY If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.

Steve Krug

#17. When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What

Steve Krug

#18. The fact that the people who built the site didn't care enough to make things obvious - and easy - can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.

Steve Krug

#19. Keep it simple, so you'll keep doing it.

Steve Krug

#20. Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.

Steve Krug

#21. The main thing it usually ends up doing is revealing that the things they were arguing about weren't all that important. People often test to decide which color drapes are best, only to learn that they forgot to put windows in the room.

Steve Krug

#22. Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left.

Steve Krug

#23. If there's one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it's that almost any design idea
no matter how appallingly bad
can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort.

Steve Krug

#24. It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

Steve Krug

#25. Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are
generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.

Steve Krug

#26. Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.

Steve Krug

#27. If you're going to implement video, do it as well as YouTube does it or don't do it at all.

Steve Krug

#28. (Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.)

Steve Krug

#29. Happy talk must die

Steve Krug

#30. If you can't make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

Steve Krug

#31. Your guess [about the future of technology] is as good as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is (a) most of the predictions I hear are almost certainly wrong, and (b) the things that will turn out to be important will come as a surprise, even though in hindsight they'll seem perfectly obvious.

Steve Krug

#32. Sincerity: that's the hard part. If you can fake that, the rest is easy.

Steve Krug

#33. Don't make me think

Steve Krug