Don't Make me Click?! Book Club: Don't Make me Think - Chapter 4

Andrew Nolan

2023-03-25

Krug's Second Law of Usability: "It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice."

When designing a page, people will often complain and say something along the lines of "don't do that, that's an extra 2 clicks for the user!"

The thing is, the number of clicks is a bad metric.

What we really care about is how long it takes to get there or how easy it is to find what you are looking for. Taking only one click to find something is no good if it takes cognitive effort to figure out where to click. If you can do three unambiguous mindless clicks in the same amount of time that may be a much better design.

The web has a lot of choices. If you want your site to be easy to use. Make those choices as mindless as possible.

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