Quotes from Steve Krug

And not just the right thing; it's profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn't get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people's lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people's lives just by doing our job a little better?

Happy talk must die

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.

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

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.

The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at "muddling through" have failed.

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

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.

If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it's less likely to be used.

usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.

When fixing problems, always do the least you can.

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.

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

It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG'S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.

Or as Jakob Nielsen so aptly put it: The human brain's capacity doesn't change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behavior have a very long shelf life. What was difficult for users twenty years ago continues to be difficult today. I

The name of the page will match the words I clicked to get there. In

In the last few years, making things more usable has become almost everybody's responsibility. Visual designers and developers now often find themselves doing things like interaction design (deciding what happens next when the user clicks, taps, or swipes) and information architecture (figuring out how everything should be organized). I

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.

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