Summary: Don't make me think(revisited) by Steve Krug
chestergrant.com
chestergrant.com
To me it was all about understanding the limitations, motivations, understandings, and abilities of our users or audience, and giving them a chance to get what they need with a minimum of fuss (thereby making our site/tool/whatever of maximum utility).
I want to say I’ll read the book now, but I’m not sure if that is true. (I a deliberately eliding a joke about my own satisficety for the sake of you, dear reader. :) ) I will bookmark this page and I expect that I will come back to it. In particular I liked the practical and useful plan for performing tests.
I don't know. So nowadays I open a typical web page of some framework or cloud service, and what do I see? Stock photos, generous whitespace and inspiring slogans. What does the product do? What problems does it solve? How does one use it? I suddenly have to think really hard to infer that.
I completely ignore the landing pages these days and head right to the documentation.
I get that one is trying to be clever and concise, but "Don't make me think" as a core value really sucks; there ought to be some consideration of "the world you're building" when "don't make me think" is a virtue.
(Compare to e.g. "Don't be evil." Has Google always succeeded at this? Of course not, but it feels as if having it in the background has been valuable.)
I might describe the core value differently: know your audience and focus on their needs, not yours (showmanship, looking busy, ego, etc.). By showing respect for your audience/user, you're helping them be better and more effective. Reduced to a phrase, it means that the audience/user shows up knowing what they want (even if they think they don't), so don't make them suffer for it.
The advice is about interface design, which is principally transactional. It's not social policy so, you know, it works.
When it comes to Google, I think it's important to distinguish the Larry/Sergey/Eric era from the Sundar/Ruth Era.* Old Google was decidedly not evil. One might dislike some of their choices, but they weren't evil.
* Having been there during both, I find it hard to reconcile them as a single company. Changes that started in 2015 only became obvious to many Googlers in the past year or two. It's the late afternoon for them and the morning's hangover is wearing off.
My gut says that more confirmation studies are needed on the energy savings. I mean yes, they technically keep the building sealed, but they operate like a giant fan, constantly forcing the exchange of indoor and outdoor air. I would expect that they waste energy, not save it.
The MIT study from 2006 is pretty good.
https://web.mit.edu/~slanou/www/shared_documents/366_06_REVO...
However, I would note:
1. The MIT study makes a lot of assumptions (which they acknowledge).
2. In particular, the MIT study didn't put much effort into carefully measuring real conditions, e.g. using a blower door test. I'd like to see a study that does.
3. The MIT study was arguably more concerned with the psychology of door usage than energy.
4. Other than the MIT study, modern research on this topic is actually pretty sparse. There have been numerous examples of old studies not being reproducible, so I think it's fair to want a reproduction with current materials and building practices.
5. Some of the studies I've seen did not ensure the weather seals were equivalent. Revolving doors tend to have beefier seals. In my opinion, that makes the comparison less meaningful.