Steve Krug Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Happy talk must die — Steve Krug

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

I usually call these endless discussions "religious debates," because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can't be proven - supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important — Steve Krug

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

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

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

When fixing problems, always do the least you can. — Steve Krug

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

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

As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work. — Steve Krug

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

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

If you can't make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory. — Steve Krug

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

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. — Steve Krug

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

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

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left. — Steve Krug

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

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

Keep it simple, so you'll keep doing it. — Steve Krug

(Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.) — Steve Krug

Sincerity: that's the hard part. If you can fake that, the rest is easy. — Steve Krug

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

Don't make me think — Steve Krug

Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away. — Steve Krug

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

Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you've made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue ("Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%"). There's an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew. — Steve Krug

You actually can be too rich or too thin — Steve Krug

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

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

Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done. — Steve Krug

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

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

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? — Steve Krug