Reading Summary: Steve Krug's "Things You Need to Get Right"

So I'm reading Chapter 6 of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, "Street signs and bread crumbs" and he begins with an analogy between a department store and a webpage, to show how navigation works and can be optimized.  It's a cute little comparison - except that he leaves out one very important detail - at least in my opinion.  He talks about how in a department store there is a hierarchy from Department to Aisle, etc. - and says that is like menus and sub-menus on a web page.  Here's the kicker though, a department store has real merchandise, and chances are your product is only going to be in one place even if the product could feasibly fall in a number of categories (I like to think of bottled ice tea instead of his chainsaw example, is it with the tea and coffee? or the juice? or the soda?).  Well, in a store it is in ONE place - but on the web?  It can show up wherever people might possibly be looking for it!

The rest of the chapter was "eh" - it's starting to become apparent that this is a book from 2006.  It has good notes on navigation structure and the basics are all kind of the same, but Krug waxes on about how amazing tabs are - and guess what? in 2013 they're barely used any more (except in internet browsers!).

In Chapter 7, "The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home page is beyond your control" specifically talks about pull downs, the old fashioned kind he decided weren't worth his time (but hey, new fangled pull downs are all the rage now!).  It just goes to show you that you can never really rule anything out or say that something is the absolute best forever.  Technological advances make a huge difference, and as with everything else, style is just always changing - even if it's reminiscent of the past.

Other than that there was some interesting information on taglines, how they should really tell - very quickly - what it is your site does.  And how home page space is at such a high premium.  It's definitely easy to see how a homepage could become over crowded.  I also appreciated his analysis of sites and what he would change (and even how he thought he might change something but decided that didn't work, etc.).  It was helpful.

And that's that for now.