KRUG’s first law of Usability ☝🏻

• As far as humanly possible, when you look at a web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.
• I should be able to “get it”—what it is and how to use it—without expending any effort thinking about it

Not Thinking

Thinking

<aside> 💡 When you are creating a site, your job is to get rid of question marks.

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Note that these things are always on a continuum somewhere between “Obvious to everybody” and “Truly obscure,” and there are always tradeoffs involved.

Another needless source of question marks over people’s heads is links and buttons that aren’t obviously clickable. As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

Here are few things that that users shouldn’t spend their time thinking about, like

• Where am I?
• Where should I begin?
• Where did they put _____?
• What are the most important things on this page?
• Why did they call it that?
• Is that an ad or part of the site?

But the last thing you need is another checklist to add to your stack of design checklists. The most important thing you can do is to understand the basic principle of eliminating question marks. When you do, you’ll begin to notice all the things that make you think in the sites and apps you use. And eventually you’ll learn to recognize and avoid them in the things you’re building.

You can’t make everything self-evident

Your goal should be for each page or screen to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it. In other words, they’ll “get it” without having to think about it.

Sometimes, though, particularly if you’re doing something original or groundbreaking or something that’s inherently complicated, you have to settle for self-explanatory. On a self-explanatory page, it takes a little thought to “get it”—but only a little. The appearance of things (like size, color, and layout), their well-chosen names, and the small amounts of carefully crafted text should all work together to create a sense of nearly effortless understanding.

<aside> 💡 If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

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