Three Minutes With Leading Web Designer Steve Krug

Common Problems

IDGNS: What are some persistent, common problems you run into time and again?

Krug: One I harp on a lot is this bashfulness about telling people what the site is on the home page. When you open a site and go to the home page, you should be able to tell right away who is publishing this, what's it for and what kind of content is here. The entity has to identify itself. ... A tagline or some kind of identifier up in the header space that travels on every page is useful from that regard.

The assumption organizations make is that everyone knows who they are and they don't need to tell them. If you can't fit it in the header [on every page] you want to have a little blurb near the top of the home page at the beginning of the content space. People say: "We don't need to do that on the home page because most people now get here through a Google search and they don't pass through the home page." But the truth is that after people get to a page from a Google search, the next thing they do is go to that site's home page to figure out what this site is.

IDGNS: Should you set an ROI [return on investment] goal for a site usability redesign?

Krug: I find that difficult because it tends to be hard to calculate. Clearly, people proposing the redesign should have specific objectives for what they think will improve as a result of it. They should be able to make some kind of convincing case that this is going to produce some kind of result that will be worth the effort. It's not that hard to come up with. After a site has been up for a couple of years, everyone has a pretty good idea of what's not working.

The trick is to keep the redesign project focused on fixing the things that aren't working, and not just to make the site look better and have a fresh look. There is a significant cost associated not only with the effort of doing the redesign, but you can also have a certain amount of pushback from people who by human nature don't want anything changed.

So I don't know about setting an ROI target upfront, but I do know it's important how you introduce the redesign. You can't just spring it on people. You want to give your existing users a preview of what's going to happen, put up a link saying we're doing a redesign and let them click through some pages of the new design before it's launched.

If people feel you are looking for their input instead of springing it on them, that soothes a lot of people's feelings. And by doing this, you can also get some valid points from people about why they don't like some things. By getting that feedback before you launch it, you can go in and tweak some things and avoid inadvertently ruining the way people were doing things.