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Home » Blog » UX News

Steve Krug Interview Full Transcript

  > PART 1**>  **

**>  **

**> Harvey: **> [00:00] Hello, my name is Harvey Ranola. I’m with the marketing team here at UserTesting, and today we have a very special guest. He is the author of “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” and the very, very popular “Don’t Make Me Think” which has been translated in 20 languages and has sold more than 400,000 copies. Our guest today is none other than usability expert Steve Krug.

Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. > Steve:> Oh, thanks for asking me. I’m looking forward to it.

> Harvey:> [00:52] Now, it has been a while since the last time that you joined us. You did three live usability reviews, which people could actually check out on our blog. Today you’re here to talk to us about the latest edition of “Don’t Make Me Think” which we’re all very excited about. Could you tell us why, after 14 years, did you decide that it was time to revisit your book?

> Steve:>  [laughs] I never know how candid to be. My problem is I tend to be very candid about these things. My publisher has never complained, but I have a feeling that they’re sort of biting their tongues a lot.

I’m sort of notorious for not wanting to write. I’m notorious for whining about how hard I find writing, because I do, I always found it to be very hard work, and I’d rather face a root canal or something than stare at the screen. And I have been putting it off for years. I did a second edition about six years ago, and the candid story about that is all over the place. Basically, I did it because I could get a new contract.

[laughs] All right, I’ll tell the story, briefly. When I first wrote the book, the way the deal was struck was that I got half the royalty, which was, in fact, a great deal. The fact that I got to write the book at all was a great deal. Roger Black was the initiator of that, and some other people. I felt very fortunate.

Six years later, the company that was getting the other half of the royalty had been sold three times. The third successor company didn’t even know that they owned those rights. The publisher wrote to me and said, “Who should we send these checks to?” It thought, “This is kind of silly.”

If I wrote a new edition, I knew I would get a new contract and I could get all the royalty, which seemed fair enough at that point after six years, so I did. But the fact is, the reason why I was putting it off was that I didn’t think there was that much that had changed. Apart from the fact that it was a lot of work, I read through it again, and thought, “This is still all pretty much what I’d say, and still pretty much all true.”

Here it is now, another six or seven years later, and as I describe in the introduction to the new edition, it’s no surprise to anybody that things have changed a lot lately. [laughs] .

> Harvey:>  [laughs] [03:24] For the people who have read previous editions of “Don’t Make Me Think,” what do you think is the most important takeaway from this new edition?

> Steve:> It’s hard to say. I lot of it is still the same. I went in and updated pretty much all of the examples, since the examples were from 1999. [laughter]

> Steve:> That was one of the reasons why I felt compelled to do a new edition. As I say in the book, I said I had the same feeling that we had when my son was young and we tried to get him to watch black and white movies. You couldn’t argue with his hesitancy to watch black and white movies with in-camera optical effects from the ’30s and ’40s.

I have the same feeling about the book, with the examples being from 1999. It was pretty easy to look at them. I was just grateful that so many people would write reviews saying, “Yeah, the examples are out of date, but it’s still all true.” But I felt that people deserved new examples, and it would be interesting to go in and take a look around and replace them, even though that’s a lot of work.

The takeaways, I think there are a lot of takeaways in the book myself. I think like the top 20, out of the top 20 like 16 of them are still the same top takeaways from the first edition, because as Jacob Nielson’s pointed out really well, usability isn’t about technology.

It’s about people and how they understand things and our cognitive abilities and our patience and our level of distraction and whatnot. Even though the technology changes really fast, the usability issues, the basic usability issues don’t change that fast.

But on the other hand there are a bunch of new things happen and a lot of them do relate to mobile, where there really are different considerations for usability, given that mobile just like fell out of the sky like a piano and landed on us.

[laughter]

> Steve:> So fast. I would say most of the takeaways are probably…You asked me what they were.

[laughter]

> Steve:> There’s a good question. One of them that I hoped people would take away that actually was in the first edition, I had this thing in the first edition about explaining the religious debates that people, when people debated about usability and how to implement things, they came at it from different perspectives. [inaudible 00:07:11] , but it was developers and marketing people and designers and whatnot.

One of the things that I realized over the years was that the reason why this happened so much was because these reactions that they had were, they had the jobs that they had because of who they were. Like designers became designers because they liked visually interesting things and developers became developers because they liked complicated things with lots of moving parts.

The realization for me was that as a result, these reactions that they had to stuff was at a brain chemical level, that there were endorphins released when they saw the stuff that they liked. Because it was at that level it was hard for them to imagine that other people didn’t feel exactly the same way. That’s one of them.

One of them is understand your neighbors on the job. I guess one of the key takeaways for mobile is, maybe for people that have an understanding of exactly how many tradeoffs you’re dealing with.

I used the word tradeoff in there because one of the things about mobile is there are now so many tradeoffs involved in coming up with a design, particularly where people are compelled to come up with a one-size-fits-all design, that I think people need to be aware that there are always going to be tradeoffs for this, the nature of design, and that you can make whatever tradeoffs you want as long as you are continually going in and making sure that you haven’t messed up the usability.

> Harvey:>  [08:13] Is there anything aside from just how fast mobile’s been progressing, anything aside from that that really inspired you to devote a section of this to your new book?

> Steve:> I kept my ears open for about a year and thought about what would people want me to discuss? What would people expect to see in a new edition? Even two years ago when I started thinking about it mobile was number one. It’s the problem that people face all the time now is designing for mobile. They would want to know what the usability component of that was, so they should be aware.

I thought about social networking, but the fact is, and there are some references to social networking. But the fact is doing usability for social network is sort of the same as doing usability for almost everything else. You just do it, you use common sense, you figure out what people need to do and you come up with easy ways for them to do it, and then you test the heck out of it.

[laughter]

> Steve:> Like, the formula. I knew that there wasn’t going to be much for me to say about social networking. When I ask people, I did do a little bit of user research. I would ask people, particularly whenever they asked me if I was going to do a new edition, I would say, “What would you want in it?” They’d think about it and they’d say, “Maybe new examples. Just mobile.”

[laughter]

> Harvey:>  [09:58] We know you’re a bit of a perfectionist. You talked a little bit about how you decided not to go full-bore with a section on social media. But was there anything in particular that was really difficult for you to cut from the book that we’re not seeing in this particular edition?

> Steve:> There was the picture of my wife.

[laughter]

> Steve:> In the other two editions there was a picture of my wife at the end of the introduction. It’s like something my wife said and the quote in her speech balloon was if something’s hard to use, I don’t use it as much, which summed it up pretty well. But I couldn’t find a way to fit that into the new scheme of things. That was hard.

[laughter]

> Steve:> There is a lovely picture of her in the acknowledgements, though.

> Harvey:> Was that the compromise that you had to reach? > Steve:> Yes, exactly. That was the tradeoff.

[laughter]

> Steve:> No, there was going to be a lovely picture of her in the acknowledgements anyway. But other stuff that really was hard to cut. I felt a little bad about two things actually. One was I felt a little bad about not having a section in a chapter the heading of which was “If you love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?” Because that was one of my favorite headings.

But the fact is that section was focused on tabs, and there’s stuff in there about tabs but it’s not the same kind of issue. Obviously, Amazon hasn’t used tabs for 10 years now in that way that I talk about. I actually think I’m going to do a blog post, the title of which would be, “If you still love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?” and talk about the other things that I think Amazon does incredibly well. I felt bad about leaving that out.

Kind of the biggest omission was I left out the makeovers. There were at the end of the navigation chapter, there were three sites I think, two or three where basically it was, you go in and find the navigation elements in these sites. In the course of giving the answers to those, it was are these sites doing a good enough job of orienting you? I actually did makeovers on them.

I didn’t do those this time around, and I felt bad about it. I wonder if people ever used it. It gets used in courses a lot. I wonder if people ever use that as part of a curriculum. I’m planning on doing some of them and pouting them up on the website. That was probably the only thing that I really agonized over leaving out. But I needed the extra space to fit mobile in.

> Harvey:> [13:25] For people who really can’t wait for your next book, and I know that you just mentioned your website. Could you tell the listeners how they could keep track of what you’re doing and how they can follow you online?

> Steve:> Sure. There’s far too many ways, I suppose. My website is > > sensible.com> , but actually you could get to it the same way I usually get to it which is just to Google Steve Krug and then click on the first link.

[laughter]

> Steve:> See, you don’t even have to remember it. That tends to have links to current interviews and the stuff you’d expect on our website. But the other two ways to do it are, I actually have a blog which I always say I’m going to start writing more on the blog, but I think this time around I probably will. Because I have so much stuff left over in my head that there wasn’t room or time enough to do in the book. I have a feeling I will be doing some blogging.

The blog, actually the easy way to get the blog is to go to > > sensible.com>  and click on the blog link. The blog itself is called > > someslightlyirregular.com> . But nobody knows that, so the easiest way is to just go to the website. But the other way is to follow me on the Twitter, as Dave Letterman says. I’m > > skrug> on “The Twitter.” I have taken more and more to tweeting. A lot of it, unfortunately, falls in the category of shameless self-promotion, but that’s inevitable. But I like Twitter.

> Harvey:> I think we all do.

> Steve:> That’s the easiest way. Because actually if I post something on the blog, I will also tweet that it’s on the blog. That’s probably the simplest way.

> Harvey:> Right, right. I should move us back on topic since I got us off on that tangent. You have been doing this for some time now.

[laughter]

> Steve:> I have to tell you, I live almost all of my life on tangents, so that’s OK.

> Harvey:>  [laughs] [15:37] I think a lot of us do. You’ve been writing books for a while now and also focusing a lot on usability and consulting. I’m sure that over the years you’ve seen a lot of different areas where websites need improvement. I do have a two-part question for you.

[laughter] > Steve:> How many points per each part?

> Harvey:>  [laughs] I haven’t determined that yet. [laughs] But the first part of the question is, what parts of websites are still consistently bad, or at least still consistently need improvement, and what should people be doing to address them? I guess that was a trick. It’s more like two and a half questions.

> Steve:> It’s like 1A and B.

> Harvey:> Exactly. The second part is do you have any plans to address these tips in future editions of your book?

> Steve:> Ah, OK. Let me take the second part first. I love it when people say that. It raises the question of what belongs in that book. It’s the same thing when I was doing workshops. People would say, “Well, do a workshop on advanced topics.” I would always say, “Well, what would the advanced topics be?”

[laughter]

> Steve:> There’s usually not a very good answer to that. It’s the same thing with the book. I don’t go into details of implementation, or saying what’s right and wrong, very much in the book. It’s ways to do things. There are great design pattern libraries out there for websites, for apps, and for mobile. Those are good places to look.

Even if I ever did another version of this book, the details are only in it to get people thinking about the larger points. There are so many people out there doing great jobs of spelling out specifics, and pros and cons of best practices.

People should do what I do. If you’re doing a form, and you’ve got a questions about how to do a form, then Google and find a couple of the people who write really well about making forms usable. They spend all their time thinking about it. In fact I talk about forms a bunch in the book in that same light. Caroline Jarrett and Luke W. If I had a forms question, I would go and see what they’ve written.

[laughter]

> Steve:> I’m not the person to do that. I’m the big-picture person, I suppose, and in some ways the introductory person. What I like is that people tell me that, while it was introductory for them, they still go back every couple of years and read it again, and get reminded of the basic principles.

That’s my answer to question two, which is it’s unlikely that I’ll do much of that stuff, even in the blogging. Part one, A and B, was, “What’s going wrong out there?”

> Harvey:> Consistently that you have been seeing throughout your career and things that people haven’t been addressing.

> Steve:> What was B? > Harvey:> Let me just repeat that entire section. > Steve:>  [laughs]

> Harvey:> I’m not sure if I communicated it very well the first time along.

> Steve:> No, it was fine. I understood at the time, I just have a mind like a stew.

> Harvey:> The question was, what parts of websites are still consistently in need of improvement, and what should people be doing to address that?

> Steve:> Ah, OK. I hope I don’t get in trouble for this. I seem to be afraid of getting in trouble lately. [laughs] I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

I have to admit that part of doing the new edition of the book meant going out and looking at a lot of stuff. I have this theory about examples, that you actually can’t go looking for examples. They have to come to you. On the other hand, as the lean people say, you do have to get out of the building.

My theory about examples is that you basically have to formulate in your head what it is you’re looking for an example of, and think about what the aspects of it would be like, then just go about your daily life. Within 24 hours, you’ll come across the perfect example. That’s always worked for me.

On the other hand, I also feel the need to get out of my usual comfort zone. There are maybe 15 sites that I go to. Apart from being linked out from them to articles and whatnot in other places, I don’t get around that much. Like most people. I felt the need to get a broader exposure. One of the things I did was spend a bunch of time with StumbleUpon. Have you ever seen StumbleUpon?

> Harvey:> Mm-hmm.

> Steve:> Because StumbleUpon will take you places you’ve never been before.

> Harvey:>  [laughs] Yeah, right.

> Steve:>  [laughs] Whether you want to go or not. What I did was I got a broader view of what people are doing out there now than I had bothered to take in for a while. I stay in the world that I stay in, like most people.

What surprised me was, this is where I’m going to get in trouble, I was disappointed that in some ways stuff was just falling apart, I find, rather than getting better. I was disappointed by a lot of what I saw, and it was hard to find really good examples of things done well. I don’t like to use examples of things done badly.

I think it’s easier to learn from really good sites, where things are going wrong anyway. Because it reinforces the point that no matter how good you are at it, things are going to go wrong, so you need to be testing. It’s also heartening that everybody has these problems. It’s not just you.

I was looking for good examples of a bunch of things to use in the book, and in some cases I found it really hard to find them, which was disheartening. One specific, and it’s a favorite of mine, is you-are-here indicators. I always think you-are-here indicators are really good things. In your navigation, the place you are in the navigation is highlighted.

At a glance you can see where you are in the scheme of things, and it just reinforces the whole structure of the navigation. It also helps, if you are not using the navigation and you are doing what people are doing so much now, which is deep dive into stuff. You look for it on Google, and you end up in the middle of somewhere, and you have no idea where it is that you are.

It’s nice to be able to look around on the page and say, “Oh, OK. This is the site I’m in, and this is the section I’m in. These are the other sections that they have. Now I have some idea of the kind of stuff that they have.” Elizabeth Bales, who worked on the book with me, and I both spent a lot of time looking for examples of you-are-here indicators done reasonably well.

In fact, we looked at some articles about you-are-here indicators, [laughs] and even looking at them, it was really hard to find people who did it. In the wild, it was really hard to find people who did it at all. It’s gone by the way. It’s disappeared as something to do. The people who did it weren’t necessarily doing a great job of it, at least from my perspective. There’s other things. There’s this one-page site design. You know what I’m talking about?

> Harvey:> Mm-hmm.

> Steve:> Basically, some stuff at the top. Maybe something like navigation, but the navigation is really anchor links, so take you down to further sections on the page.

> Harvey:> Long-form sell pages?

> Steve:> Yeah, exactly. Long-form sell pages with a lot of big graphics, where everything is organized by lumps of graphics, so it looks like a succession of ads. I’m not against that, but there seemed to be a lot of it that was being done inappropriately, where it really was not quite the right thing to do.

My problem is that I do take a long view of this stuff. One of the problems with dealing with mobile in this is that mobile’s so unformed at this point. I refer to it as the “Wild West days.” It still is.

Most people are too young to remember, you’re too young to remember , what happened when people were first able to do word processing. When the Mac came out, and when Word showed up on the PC and you could do word processing, as opposed to doing everything on a typewriter. People went crazy. People went bananas, like, “Let’s use as many fonts as we can.” The world was really not a good place for a couple years there.

That’s how it feels about mobile right now. People are scrambling so fast, and they have new license to try stuff out, which is fine. I try to explain in the book, I’m not really anti-experimentation, or anti-innovation at all. I like those, but I also like stuff that works.

> Harvey:> Right.

> Steve:> The bottom line is I was surprised at how messy stuff is out there right now. I would have thought that it was better. I attribute some of it to the fact that people are busy refitting new storm windows for mobile, and trying things out, but we’ll see.

> Harvey:>  [laughs] We definitely will.

> Steve:> How about you? What do you think? [laughs] Are you seeing anything like that?

> Harvey:> It’s funny that I wasn’t expecting to answer a question, but now that you mention long-form…

> Steve:> Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

> Harvey:>  [laughs] You’re very surprising. The long-form cell pages, I’ve always thought that those were interesting. You see Google doing it with their product pages, and Apple doing it with theirs. I’m not sure if the phenomenon’s just a matter of people seeing that these larger companies are doing it.

> Steve:> Right.

> Harvey:> “Maybe there’s a reason that they’re doing it. There’s a method to their madness. Perhaps we should be mining this as well, to be able to emulate their success.” It’s really interesting that you point that out. Really, that’s the only thing that I have off the top of my head. I’m definitely seeing a lot more sites following that particular formula and, like you said, not necessarily in the best possible implementation.

> Steve:> I hasten to make it clear that I’m not saying, “Don’t do that.” Done well, and used where it’s appropriate, it works fine and has real value. I hasten to say that, because [laughs] I often find tweets that quote me, that quote Steve Krug, as saying, “Everything should be no more than three clicks away.” In fact, in the first and second edition, I had a three-page chapter that basically said, “People often think things should be no more than three clicks away. That’s not true.”

[laughter]

> Steve:> I will now end up being tweeted as coming out against one-page sites.

> Harvey:> We’ll do our best to encourage people to listen to the interview in its entirety to gain a better understanding of the context in which some of these comments are being said. I know there are still a lot of professionals out there in marketing and design, and other industries that are outside of UX, who are having a bit of trouble getting their organization to buy into usability testing.

[29:20] To get back on topic, and talk about your book, how can they use your book to get their managers or team mates to buy in?

> Steve:> Well… [laughs] > Harvey:>  [laughs] Surprise.

> Steve:> My favorite always has been buy a copy and leave it around for your boss to come across, and maybe put one or two Post-Its in it and hope that, because it’s profusely illustrated, that they’ll pick it up and start reading it, and from my perspective hopefully, as I get told so often, that they’ll buy copies for the whole department or whatever. I love that little story.

> Steve:>   I do hear it all the time. But it is interesting how often I hear that story, that I gave a copy to my boss and by golly he actually read it because it was so short and accessible and profusely illustrated. That’s sort of my number one recommendation, as we say, blatant self-promotion.

But the other piece of advice that I always give people that I like a lot, and a lot of people have come back and said yeah I tried that and it worked really well, is to do a usability test. There’s an enormous amount of value. Usability tests have a great conversion capability. People sit there and watch a usability test, is I think the way most people actually get the value of usability is when they finally accept the usability test.

What I usually recommend is if people aren’t doing usability work where you are, do a skunkworks thing and put on a usability test. The simplest one to do is to say, “All right, we’re going to do a usability test of our competitors. So next Thursday we’re going to have two people come in and they’re going to use two of our competitor’s sites to try and do the same thing they would do on our site, and everybody’s invited and we’re going to have really good snacks,” because you know how much I tout the value of good snacks.

> Harvey:>   It’s very important.

> Steve:>   Very valuable. Then just do it, and the nice thing about it is people will come and watch because everybody wants to know how your competitors are doing. Everybody assumes that you’re doing OK, but they really want to know how your competitors are doing.

You’ll get all kinds of people to come, and also the other nice thing about as a way to start is that nobody in your organization has anything on the line. Nobody’s going to be there whose stuff is going to be shown to have problems, because it’s not your stuff, so nobody’s nervous about it and everybody feels good about it.

If I have a tip, that’s the tip, which is do an informal usability test of a couple competitors. I replaced a chapter, I forget what it was titled, something like “Help! My Boss Wants Me To…” Blank, I think was what it was. I’ll put that up on the website just in case people are still interested in it.

But I replaced it with the last called “Guide For the Perplexed: Making Usability Happen Where You Live,” which is some advice about how to get people doing usability. Get buy in from your boss and from your coworkers.

> Harvey:>   [33:54] You made us wait about four years between “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” and your latest edition of “Don’t Make Me Think.” Are there any books in the works, and what can we expect it to be about?

> Steve:>   I’m sure my wife would say there are no books in the works. Although I didn’t make her nearly as miserable this time as I have in previous projects. I stayed pretty sane this time, partly thanks to having Elizabeth working with me on it, and also the people from New Writers who were just really, really helpful.

But I did manage to stay very sane. There was another book I thought of doing before this one that’s actually a blogger market book. It’s actually not for people doing UX. It’s kind of a for-everybody book about computers and how ordinary they can be or how difficult they can be and how to live better with them.

> Steve:>   How to not feel like they’re making your life miserable. I thought about that a lot, and I don’t know if I’ll get around to doing that. I would sort of like to do it. I have a bunch of things I would like to do, but book-wise that’s probably the one.

I suppose I should do an update of rocket surgery just to encompass mobile testing, because mobile testing wasn’t a thing. Testing mobile devices wasn’t a thing when I did it. I put some of that in the testing chapter in this new edition. In fact I put in instructions. You’ve seen my Brundlefly, my mobile testing camera, cobbled together from a book laying in a webcam.

> Harvey:>   I love the ’90s sci-fi reference of Brundlefly.

> Steve:>   I always loved Brundlefly. It’s such a great… > Harvey:>   That movie scared me as a kid, just watching the…

> Steve:>   Oh, I just watched half of it the other day and it scared me. Really, it is like, “Oh God!” Cronenberg at his best. No, it was really creepy. Plus what’s-her-name, was so gorgeous at the time. What is her name? She was married to Jeff Goldblum at the time.

> Harvey:>   That makes things a lot more interesting. I think that would actually compel me to watch it again just to see their on-screen chemistry. I can’t think of her name either.

> Steve:>   See now if only we had a way to look that up.

> Harvey:>   That’s something we could take offline. > Steve:>   Yeah, right. OK.

> Harvey:>   [37:21] We’re all very excited to read the latest edition of your book, and we’re going to wrap up this part of the interview. But I’m sure everyone who’s listening will be really eager to read it as well. What’s the best way for us to be able to get a hold of your new book?

> Steve:>   The best way for me…

> Steve:>   …is to go to > > Sensible.com>  and go to the page which is in the navigation for Don’t Make Me Think, and click on one of the links there. Because I have links there that are going to be an extra dollar from Amazon associates and what not. If you feel like taking an extra two clicks and doing me a favor, then that’s always nice.

But otherwise > > Amazon.com> , a number of Amazons all over the world at this point, it hasn’t been translated yet, but the English version’s available in Canada, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, I noticed that they’ve all been selling it. Amazon’s always good. > > Peachpit.com> , the publisher, often has sales.

It’s available in Kindle on Amazon and it’s available in the other e-book formats; PDF and, what is it, iBook? eBook? I don’t know, I get confused. But the formats for the other devices are available at the Peachpit site. But there are links for all of those basically on the book page at my site, at > > Sensible.com> . That’s kind of the easiest way to find them.

I never did this before, but I’m going to start putting links up there as translations come out so people can find the translations.

> Harvey:>   That’s great. I’m sure our international listeners will be very excited to…

> Steve:>   Yeah, I’ve never done it just because it’s kind of hard because I have no idea when a translation is going to happen. I know nothing about it until I get two copies of the book in the mail, and even then it’s often hard for me to find where it is they’re being sold. Various places, but I’m going to make an effort this time.

> Harvey:>   That’s great. Like I was saying, this is the end of the first part of our interview. Thank you so much for joining us today, Steve, and giving us an inside look into the work that went into your new book.

For listeners who can’t get enough of Steve Krug, we’ll be posting the second part of this interview online next week, so be sure to keep an eye out for it. If you haven’t had a chance to watch Steve Krug’s last user testing webinar, you can also find it on our blog on demand.

> PART 2

> Harvey:> [00:00] Are there any conferences that you’re looking forward to in 2014, and why?

> Steve:>   I don’t get too many conferences. I always go to, now it’s the UXPA, the User Experience Professionals Association. It was the association formally known as Prince, it was the UPA, the Usability Professionals. I always go to that because it’s a really nice conference.

It’s always held in some hot month, usually June or July, and in some really hot place because they can get a really nice resort hotel that nobody in their right mind would want to go to in that weather, but it’s OK because you’re always in the air conditioning.

It’s a very interesting conference because it’s very much practitioners. It’s not particularly theoretical at all, as opposed to say something like KAI. I always enjoy it. I always learn stuff and spend a lot of time thinking about stuff that I haven’t had time to think about otherwise.

So we go into that also because it’s in London this year for the first time, and I never pass up a chance to go to London. I’ll get my wife to go this time.

> Harvey:>   Do you have any favorite haunts over in London?

> Steve:>   I have advice. I have travel advice, and I get around so little that I have no travel advice. But if you go to London, go to Churchill’s War Room. It’s actually on Downing Street. It’s on the corner of Downing Street, and it’s a museum which is in fact the underground complex, several stories down, that Churchill managed the war from.

And they restored it, it’s got a lot of the original cots and maps. It’s the best museum. Someone told me years ago this is the best museum you’ll ever go to, and it really is amazing. So I highly recommend that.

I made the mistake once of when I was asking for directions to it I asked a Bobby, I guess you would call him, on the street where Churchill’s bunker was, and he said quite pleasantly, “Hitler had a bunker. Churchill had a war room.”

> Steve:>   Anyway, I would recommend that. You sort of can’t go wrong in London.

I don’t go to any conferences. Every year I feel like I should. I used to go to the IA summit every once in a while, but I’ve never been to all these new ones, not new, they’re like eight years old now, IXDA and the other ones. And every year I always read about them and they sound really interesting. But I haven’t gotten to any of them. I think in the back of my head I’m sort of waiting for someone to invite me. But maybe I’ll get around to one of those.

There’s a lot of stuff out there now. From reading people’s descriptions of them and how much they learn from them, I think there’s a lot of really good conferences.

> Harvey:> [03:39] Question number two, what were some of the trends you noticed in 2013 that you weren’t seeing in years before? I think we sort of covered that.

> Steve:>    I sort of feel like…Remember Dana Carvey doing the church lady?

> Harvey:>   No, I don’t think I’ve seen it. Is that SNL days?

> Steve:>   It’s an old SNL where she was this he, dressed up in drag, was the church lady, who was this hardcore…She basically interviewed whatever celebrity was guest hosting on Church Chat, and she’d say, “So your success, do you think it comes from your relationship with Satan?”

> Steve:>   I kind of feel like that. I don’t know, new trend’s maybe mobile?

> Steve:>   I’m not sure how much. We talked about some of this, the one page sites, and trends. The way the trends emerged with apps, which fascinates me, and I wonder how the numbers work on out this. Nowadays I assume the people are always running the numbers, but you never know.

All these apps that you go to, and they won’t tell you anything about themselves until you’ve registered. There isn’t even anything that says what it does until you’ve registered. I find that an interesting trend.

I sort of thought Luke W had fixed that a couple years ago. He did, what was it, Polar or something? They made a point that you could go in and use it for a while without registering, and then in fact it sort of saved your data by cookieing, and then when you actually registered the data you’d accumulated so far was there for you, which seemed like a much more reasonable approach.

So I’m always surprised when I see that, and quite honestly I walk away. I step away from the car as soon as I run into something that’s not even going to tell me anything about itself. They’ve always got some questions I want answered before I’m going to register at all. That trend surprises me.

And I assume that the numbers work out where you register by linking your Facebook or Twitter or Gmail account. Maybe it’s just me. I’m skittish about that. It’s like, for all I know these guys are in a garage in Romania. They’re in a garage in Romania.

I know the thing is going to come up, from Twitter or Facebook, saying all right, here’s what you’re giving them permission to do. I read those and I don’t understand what it means. I have no way to figure out what the likelihood of them being able to make some bad use of me is on those descriptions.

But I suspect that I’m probably alone in that. I suspect that most people just say “Oh, what the heck1″ I sort of say that too because my attitude is like, oh, identity theft for me is just a question of when.

> Steve:>   But it’s going to be bad. I do kind of think there’s going to be an event. I think there’s going to be an event, like a long time ago there was the Tylenol scare where somebody tampered with some bottles of Tylenol and put some poison in them and put them back on drug store shelves. That’s why we have tamper-proof bottles and that’s why we have little aluminum lids on the top of everything.

I kind of feel like there’s going to be an event like that and everybody’s going to go, “Oh crap.” And a lot of stuff will change. But who knows.

> Harvey:>   We’ll keep an eye out for something like that. > Steve:>   Yeah, let me know if you hear about that.

> Harvey:>   Of course. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about unmoderated and moderated usability testing.

> Harvey:> [08:20] Saving the good stuff for last. What would you say is the number one thing to keep in mind for unmoderated usability tests, and on the other side of the coin what’s the number one thing to keep in mind for moderated testing?

> Steve:>   And I’m on record as being a fan of you guys and what you do, and I’m also on record in the book as being somewhat compensated at this point for…Not for being a fan of you guys, but for allowing you to say that I’m a fan of you guys.

But I am a big fan of the unmoderated testing, I talk about it a lot. That it’s not the same, but it’s got an enormous amount of value for a lot of uses and it’s so dead easy. I think the biggest difference is, and you guys will know this much better than I do, so we should talk, at some point, offline about your answer to this question.

But I think getting the tasks right is actually kind of crucial, more crucial in unmoderated. What’s the analogy? There’s got to be a good analogy for the fact that you have no control. It’s kind of like you’re flying a remote-controlled drone.

> Steve:>   You send it up there. That’s not the right analogy, because in that case, you theoretically have control. Somebody just came out with a $1200 remote-controlled drone with a really good camera built into it that will actually use USB and fly itself. If it gets out of your range, it will sort of fly itself back to its starting point and land itself, for $1200.

Anyway, the fact is, you’re not there to keep this person on track, or to make sure to clarify. If they don’t understand the task quite right the way you intended, you’re not there to clarify it for them.

I kind of feel like you want to have put a little bit of extra care into making sure that the task is going to be…it needs to be when you’re doing moderated testing, too, but at least moderated testing, you have the chance of mid-course correction.

Would be sure to pilot-test your tasks, which basically just means ask a friend to give them the task and let them spend 30 seconds trying to do it and make sure they understood it correctly the way you intended. I suppose that’d be one difference to put a little more focus on making sure your task is perfectly clear.

> Harvey:>   Right.

> Steve:>   Other than that, that’s kind of why I like it, because there’s not much difference. In point of fact, I think that one of the great uses for a moderated test is doing a pilot test for your in-person test, your moderated test. The day before you do your moderated tests, send one off, have one or two people do an unmoderated, and you’ll learn a lot from that that you can use to tweak how you’re going to do your moderated test.

> Harvey:>   That’s some really good advice.

> Steve:>   Moderated tests, historically, the hardest part for people is keeping themselves out of it, is not leading the witness. It’s kind of like separation of church and state or advertising and editorial. You’ve got to just let the person do it on their own no matter how much every fiber of your being wants to give them a clue.

> Steve:>   I say that because when I’ve taught the workshops and taught people to do it, I do find that tends to be the only part people have a hard time with and that people are surprised that they have a hard time with it.

It’s like I always have people do practice tests when I do workshops. I’m not sure how I’m going to approach workshops now, but when I have people do workshops where they do their own practice tests and I ask them after the first test, I say, “OK, so what was easy, what was hard?” almost always, the only thing that I get back is, “It was just really hard to keep my mouth shut.”

In point of fact, when I would walk around in the workshops, I’d wander around the room and kind of eavesdrop on people, but I found that I didn’t even have to eavesdrop; if I just looked around, if two people were talking at the same time, it was going wrong. There should be only one person talking during a usability test.

> Harvey:>   Right. > Steve:>   That’s sort of number one, tip-wise.

> Harvey:>   [14:03] OK. Let’s talk about recruiting users for a second. Has your opinion changed on how many users you should recruit for a given study, and what would you say to someone who still thinks that larger sample sizes are necessary for studies?

> Steve:>   The last five years, or however long it’s been that “Rocket Surgery’s” been out there, I’ve become more and more convinced that everything that I specked out in “Rocket Surgery” is pretty good. Partly because people report back to me, who have been doing it, and they tell me in detail what their experience was.

Also, I’ve taught a lot of people in workshops, using “Rocket Surgery,” the whole approach, and the approach for that is three users. It’s interesting, because everything in “Rocket Surgery” was tied together. One was the notion that it’s easy to find more problems than you have resources to fix, and it is.

Usability testing works really well, so it’s really easy to find problems. One of the side effects of that is often the most serious problems don’t get fix. There’s so much else that seems like, “Oh, that’s easy to fix. It’s reasonably compelling. We’ll fix that.” As a result, serious problems often seem to linger. I have, in “Rocket Surgery” a whole bunch of reasons why they tend to linger. It’s like, “That will be fixed in our next redesign,” and whatever.

It’s bizarre how you’ll go to a major site that a lot of work has been put into, and there’ll be a problem there that’s an obvious problem that you run into. You say, “Whoa, this is an obvious problem, and a lot of people must run into this problem.” As they say in “The Godfather,” “These are serious people,” that put a lot of time and energy into this thing. Yet, this problem is still there.

Part of it’s that, “Well, we’re going to have to change a lot of moving parts to fix this, so let’s wait until the next redesign,” all that. I argue in “Rocket Surgery” that, in point of fact, there’s always something you can do with those most serious problems to make them much less serious.

It’s usually a tweak. In fact, if you think of it as, “We have to fix this problem now and forever,” then yes, it’s not going to get fixed. It’s going to stay there and it’s going to keep causing people havoc.

It’s this combination of everything has usability problems. If you haven’t been doing a lot of testing and fixing, then whatever you built has serious usability problems. If you really want to fix those serious usability problems in a reasonable amount of time, you should focus on tweaking, not perfect solutions.

That way, to feed back to your original question about how many users you test, the fact is, three users doing any given set of tasks, are going to reveal to you serious usability problems, unless your site is pretty mature. The problems that most people are going to run into, three people are going to run into.

> Steve:>   My argument is, “Test three people once a month, then you’ll be busy for the month fixing what you saw them run into.” If you can do it more often, and you can test more people, and you can afford to, then feel free. But, you won’t. The fact is the more people you plan to test with, the less often you’re going to do testing.

> Harvey:>   Right.

> Steve:>   Unless you’re doing unmoderated. The fact is, if you’re doing unmoderating then it is a somewhat different ball of wax. There are, in fact, reasons to do large samples. There are certain things that you’re going to learn the right kind of information, you’re going to learn the answers you need, by doing a larger sample and doing quantitative analysis of the results.

You don’t want to do that unless you’re already doing qualitative. Qualitative is going to reveal to you the major problems. People who don’t believe it, I always think there’s an anecdote and we haven’t been able to track down who really originated it. It’s not an anecdote. I probably don’t even know the part of speech that it would be.

All right, supposing you’re in your cubicle and you see somebody walk by and they trip on the rug outside your cubicle. Then five minutes later somebody else walks by and trips on the rug outside your cubicle. How many people do you have to see trip on the rug before you decide that it’s a serious problem?

> Steve:>   Like, three is probably plenty. The fact is if what you’re talking about is serious problems and not things that…there are different categories of serious problems. There are problems that almost everybody’s going to run into that cause them more than moderate pain.

There are also problems that very few people are going to run into that will cause them a lot of pain that are more corner cases. Those are harder to nail down. In point of fact, those are probably more likely better nailed down by doing things like talking to your QA staff and your support staff and whatnot to track down corner cases. That’s three. The answer is 42, test 42 people.

> Harvey:>   The folks who hear that part of this interview definitely want to listen to the entire interview.

> Harvey:>   I can see it now on Twitter. > Steve:>   I appreciate that. > Harvey:>   Steve Krug says 42. > Steve:>   The right number of people to test  .

> Harvey:>   [20:53] Let’s talk about something a little bit more fun. What’s the most usable product that you’d used online and what about offline, or in the real world?

> Steve:>   I do want to marry it. I find Amazon to be incredibly usable. Anytime I go to do something in Amazon that I haven’t done before, I can figure out right away how to do it. In point of fact, they’re making it easier for me. I love their ‘Your account’ section. I don’t do it, but returning things on Amazon is so freaking easy, and checking the status of an order an Amazon is so easy, and looking up things that I ordered earlier because I want to reorder them.

It is sort of everything that I go to do on Amazon, I find that I have no trouble figure out how to do it and they’ve in many cases minimized the number of steps that it takes me, to my convenience. I don’t have to go looking stuff up. I still find Amazon quite a pleasure to use. In fact they’ve got me hooked with Amazon prime. I don’t even comparison shop anymore. It’s like I can have it here the day after tomorrow. Historically their prices are at least as good as everybody else’s, so I click.

> Harvey:>   That one click ordering, it gets me every time. It’s so easy.

> Steve:>   Oh, really? Yeah, I leave one click ordering turned off. I don’t know. I worry about my…

> Harvey:>   You’re wiser than I.

> Steve:>   I go ahead and order the things anyway. No question. I love the little, on my iPhone, the Starbucks app for recharging my card, for putting more money on my Starbucks card. I don’t know why, but I always find it’s just really well done and well thought out. It’s only a couple of screens. But somehow it does it exactly the way I want it to.

I suppose the thing that I’m most impressed with, the thing that I really like and I don’t know if anybody else does is Hipmunk. Have you ever used Hipmunk?

> Harvey:>   I have not, but I will after this.

> Steve:>   Yeah. It’s a travel site. It’s the same as Expedia or whatever. You plug in your cities and your dates and whatever. But almost everything on it works really smoothly in an Amazon kind of way. It’s really nicely polished and feels good. But the thing that they do that I love is when you, which you’ll see right away, just go in and pretend you’re booking a flight, is that they pull up the flights, and I don’t know how to describe it.

It’s like a timeline. As you’re looking down the page, it’s almost looks like a Gantt chart. There’s a bar for each flight. You put in your specs and there’s a bar horizontally for each flight and the left to right is a timeline of 24 hours. At a glance, you can see when the flight starts and when it arrives.

But also the flights, if it’s got a stop then the bar is broken up into segments that are the appropriate length of the flights and you can see how long the layover is in-between. You can sort these bars in all kinds and it’s real clear that you’re color-coding to show you which airline it is. Somehow it’s exactly the way I want to see flight information when I’m trying to pick out a flight. They were thinking of me, exactly what I want to see.

It’s the exact opposite of having to go in and poke in a bunch of numbers to see if a flight exists. It’s also the opposite of almost all the other, the airlines, the way they present the information where basically you’ve got a series of table rows that have begin and end times. A multi-stop flight is two or more rows.

But to understand it and to compare flights, you’ve got to in and you’ve got to look at these numbers. You have to do the math, you have to do all this math. Whereas they just put it there initially. I just think it’s great and it works really well on my iPhone, too. That’s my favorite site to use.

> Harvey:>   All right, we have a lot of things to. That’s actually going to come in handy when I’m booking my flight for New York. I’m definitely going to check out Hipmunk.

> Steve:>   Check it out. I’ll be interested to know what you think because I can’t say I’ve heard other people rave about it, but I’m just always impressed by it. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to know what you think.

Real world, I have a two-for-three-dollar letter opener from Staples that I love. It’s like a piece of plastic the size of a credit card that’s got a little tooth that you stick into the opening and then there’s a blade behind the tooth. Boy, I love that.

> Steve:>   I’ve had other letter openers and they never worked. But what I really love, actually, is my, and I should look at the number, it’s an HP 8600 printer. When my five-year-old printer died last year, I looked around. I’ve always stuck with HP printers for one thing because they have fabulous online help.

Only once have I not been able to solve a problem on my own using HP’s online help. It’s really thorough, it’s really well written, they have videos where you need videos. I’ve always been impressed by that, and the printers always worked well. But I bought this one about a year ago, and the printer cost $12.

> Harvey:>   They get you with the ink.

> Steve:>   No, they don’t get you with the ink. That’s the thing. That’s what I figured, but the ink is really not costing me that much and the ink is lasting for a long time. In fact, I do a lot of printing, and the small starter cartridges that came with the printer lasted me three months. I expected them to be gone in two weeks. The ink is not much more than it was costing me before, and I think on net overall per page, I don’t think it’s costing me more. That was what I was assuming.

But the thing that I like about it, among the things that I like about it, it’s what do they call “the Moppier.” It scans and dices vegetables and…

> Harvey:>   Massages your back.

> Steve:>   Yeah, exactly. They should sell them at Brookstone. But, and I shouldn’t say this in front of it and I should knock on wood when I say it, but it does them all incredibly well. I’ve had previous ones that do all these same things, and rather than doing what companies usually do, which is to come out with the new version that does some new things they didn’t do before and fails to do some of the things it used to do well, it does all these things unbelievably well.

I can put in a stack of pages and use the touch screen that’s on it, which I really like. I never thought I’d like a touch screen on a device like that, but the touch screen on this is perfectly clear, the menus make perfect sense. It’s so much better than when you got a menu button that you have to keep pressing to show a small 60 character screen and step down through numbered items.

The menu works really well. I can put in a stack of pages, press scan on the touch screen, press “To PC”, and it has found my PC on the network on its own, and then press “Choose PDF versus JPEG”, and it will scan the stack of pages and put them all into one JPEG. Everything it does it does incredibly well. I keep expecting it to fail at some test. It really hasn’t.

I don’t know if other companies are doing that well, but certainly this printer from that company has been sort of an evolutionary success. It’s not what you asked for, I know.

> Harvey:>   That’s great. The next time I’m in… > Steve:>   And they don’t pay me anything. HP doesn’t. > Harvey:>   You could always put up an affiliate link on your site.

> Steve:>   Oh yeah, I should! On the $12 I could make a commitment. I could put one for the ink too. That’d be great.

> Harvey:>   We were able to get a couple of questions from some of our Twitter followers. I think a lot of folks might probably still be on vacation and not paying attention to their Twitter, but we did have these questions. I’m not sure if you wanted to answer both or if you just wanted to go with one.

> Steve:>    I know I looked at them and I don’t remember. Let’s try both. I may have nothing to say about one of them.

> Harvey:> [30:43] Sure, that works. The first one is from @QCUXgal, her name’s Christina, any tips on nicely saying no to edge case feature requests when working with a large client base.

> Steve:>   Yeah. See, I read that and I didn’t read it that way.

> Steve:>   Oh dear. The way I read it, in the back of my head it was sort of, how do I say no to my engineers who are making edge case feature requests, but this is end user, so this is how do we let the outliers down nicely, gently. The fact is I don’t have an answer for that.

> Harvey:>   You just have to be up front with them.

> Steve:>   I would be up front with them. Here’s what I would do. I’ll just make something up. Here’s what I would do. I would engage the outlier and email them, or whatever the means of conversation is, and say, “Tell me about your situation. Tell me how you use this feature and exactly what you would want it to do for you.”

I always think this has two possible salutary effects. One is it makes them at least feel heard. You go out there and the thing that makes people crazy is they feel that nobody is listening to them. So even just being heard is certainly much better than not being heard and not getting what you want.

When you do a usability test one of the things you find, when people make feature requests. If somebody makes a feature request, nod so it’s clear that you’ve listened and you’ve taken this in.

And then come back to it at the end of the test when you’re in the probing session where they’re not doing the task, in the probing portion of the program, and ask them about it and say, “OK, tell me about this. You said it would be better if this was on a map instead of in a list. So can you describe for me how that would work?”

I maintain that almost every time I’ve done this, like 95 times out of 100, that what happens is the user describes it and at the end they say, “But actually I wouldn’t use that if you had it. I’d probably do it the way I do it now.”

> Steve:>   Because they realize on their own that it’s not such a great idea. But this is a little different because your outliers, they’re actually asking for things where they have a specific need and they sort of do understand exactly. They want to be able to go in and customize this setting or resize this particular piece of data this way or something. So it is a little different.

But I think even just the act of having them spell it out for you sometimes will lead them to, when they sense that they’re not going to get it, will lead them to thinking of a way that they could do it. That would be my made up advice.

> Harvey:> [34:43] Our second question then is from BethMcKeever @LinoleumTile. That’s a very interesting handle.

> Steve:>   Oh, I thought you mentioned you worked at > > LinoleumTile.com> .

> Harvey:>   That is her Twitter handle.

> Steve:>   Just Bulbs. Letterman used to have a routine where he would go to stores in Manhattan, where there’s a store for everything, and he would go to a store called Just Bulbs, and he would insist on asking the guy what they sold over and over. And he’d ask them, “Well, do you sell shades?” And the guy would finally say, “No, I think that would be a store called Just Shades, and then they would cut to Letterman at the store down the block called Just Shades.”

> Steve:>   So, what does she write?

> Harvey:>   She writes, in your opinion, what elements of a standard usability test are still necessary when trying to be as lean as possible?

> Steve:>    OK, a standard usability test. “Rocket Surgery” sort of describes my idea of lean usability testing. I don’t find that much difference between my idea of lean usability testing and what the lean people recommend, quite honestly.

I like Laura Klein’s book, what is it, “UX for Lean Startups”. I think she has a lot of good advice in it, and I don’t find anything that she’s describing as being particularly different from what I’m recommending in “Rocket Surgery.” So obviously it’s really different. If by standard usability testing you mean traditional lab testing, eight users, rigorous whatever, then there’s a big difference. I don’t know, did I misread the question?

> Harvey:>   That’s how I interpreted that too.

> Steve:>   I would say consider either Laura Klein’s book or “Rocket Surgery Made Easy.” Both pretty much spell it out. I spell it out in more detail because she’s covering much of other stuff in there too.

> Harvey:>   Awesome. That’s the end of our questions. > Steve:>   That concludes the question portion.

> Harvey:>    That does. It concludes the second part of our interview.

> Steve:>   As I say, I apologize to you and the listeners. Like I say, I’ve been cooped up writing a book for six months, so I do go on.

> Harvey:>   That’s probably something that we can tack out of the first part of the interview.

> Steve:>   Right. > Harvey:>   I think people would enjoy hearing that.

 

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