Usability as a Common Courtesy - Book Club: Don't Make me Think - Chapter 11
Andrew Nolan
2023-05-10
Mensch: a person of integrity and honor.
Steve Krug says your website should be a mensch.
It is important to make your website usable, that's the key of the Don't Make me Think book. But your website should also inspire goodwill.
If someone cannot use your website it is a quick way to lose a user. But if your website makes them feel bad it will also lose them.
It's not always one big negative that invokes ill-will, but a series of small distastes will also bring about negative feelings. If you're a marketing person, this is kind of synonymous with your "net-promoter score" going down.
To make matters worse, a user's goodwill can be situational, if you catch them on a bad day some little thing might be a deal-breaker that wouldn't matter on another day.
Luckily, we can document many ways to harm goodwill as well as improve it. Keeping these ideas in mind, along with all the usability topics we covered so far, will help improve your users' experiences.
Things that diminish goodwill:
- Hiding or obscuring the information a user wants.
- Punishing or forcing the user into doing things a certain way. Users want to do things their way.
- Trying to collect information that is not essential to using the site.
- Being disingenuous and using overtly fake sincerity.
- Filling your site with bloat.
- Having a disorganized or amateurish looking site.
All is not lost though. We can also restore and inspire goodwill in our users.
Things that increase goodwill:
- Make common or popular features obvious.
- Provide the user with only the information they need to know.
- Save the user steps and cognitive load whenever possible.
- Have a professional design that clearly has effort put into it.
- Make it easy to recover from errors when things go long.
- Know the users' frequently asked questions and answer them.
- Provide comforts like nice CSS for printing and ways to remove ads.
A lot of these ideas may feel similar to what we covered before. And that's probably true! Goodwill and usability often go hand in hand. Hopefully with all these tips we can design some sites with happy users!
Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to the RSS Feed!