The Thinly-Sliced Billboard

My half hour commute to work does afford me a very nice little luxury: the chance to listen to audio books. My wife (who’s clearly the smart one in the relationship) pointed out that our local library has quite a collection of them and I’ve been hooked ever since. I also happen to pick up some paper-based books as well.

In an happy coincidence, I happen to be listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and actually reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It is a usability treasure trove.

Blink discusses the science of why people make the first impressions that they do. He talks about “thin slicing”, which is the thinking that happens largely unconsciously and in the first two seconds of being presented with something new. It’s wittily written with a lot of surprising insights and entertaining examples.

His story of how an Army general who went on gut feelings handily defeated the U.S. Army’s computer-modeled attack on him was especially fun. The Army thought they could model out his attack strategies and created reams of documentation about him, so he basically went old-school with his technology and then did the opposite of what he would normally have done. His first attack alone would have killed 20,000 soldiers before they even fired their first shot.

Krug’s book is terribly easy to read and is short to boot! Makes sense from a usability expert, right? He makes a really great case for what he calls “billboard design” (tell your user where you want them to focus) and his discussion of how users actually use a web site is dead on. He states that they simply “muddle through”, quickly clicking on any link that seems even reasonably close to what they are looking for.

Personal highlight: his argument that it’s not the number of clicks users really care about, it’s how confident they are in their clicking. Obviously, no one wants to click for a long period of time, but users are generally happy to click away as long as they are certain that they are on the right path to their goal.

It also really didn’t hurt that one of my design heroes, Roger Black, designed the book and penned its foreword.

Enjoy!

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