本周读的是pending了5年的这本书《别让我思考》。据说这是产品经理的必读图书,虽然主要的案例还停留在设计网站的年代,但读来很多基本设计原则还是值得今天的产品经理和运营、甚至微信小编们思考。
Usability is Common Sense 这是常识,然而多数人不知道常识,直到某一天这一点被某个人一语道破。
《别让我思考》主要讲的不是什么高深的原理,作者在书的一开头就提到,他所讲的所有的东西都是“常识”(common sense)。After all, usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing—whether it’s a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door—for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated。Usability本质上就是让东西按照它原本设计的样子更好地被使用。
虽然Usability是一个“常识”,但就好像众多人间的常识一样,直到我们某一天被点醒的那一刻,我们甚至意识不到“这是常识”。Like a lot of common sense, though, it’s not necessarily obvious until after someone’s pointed it out to you.
比如这一句:Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them. —CHILDREN’S RIDDLE
Usability 原则:越难用,用得越少
There’s a good usability principle right there: if something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used. 一个服务所需要的时间越多,它被使用的可能性就越小。
As a result, if Web pages are going to be effective, they have to work most of their magic at a glance. And the best way to do this is to create pages that are self-evident, or at least self-explanatory. 网页最好是“自明”的,或者至少,它可以自己解释自己。
If history has taught us anything, it’s that Internet business models are like buses: If you miss one, all you have to do is wait a little while and another one will come along.
We don’t read pages: We scan them
所有设计产品的人首先应该知道,用户们并非在“用”或者“读”你呈现给他们的页面,他们是在“浏览”。If you want to design effective Web pages, though, you have to learn to live with three facts about real-world Web use. FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them.
除非满足以下目的的网页,我们才会认真阅读。 (a) the task at hand or (b) our current or ongoing personal interests. And of course, (c) the trigger words that are hardwired into our nervous systems, like “Free,” Sale,” and “Sex,” and our own name(包含免费、减价、性以及我们自己名字的页面)
用户真的会认真寻找答案吗?会也不会。
我们总是以为用户会做出最明智的决定。然而FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.
Designers tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing. As soon as we find a link that seems like it might lead to what we’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that we’ll click it. 我们不会选择最佳的答案,我们选择的是第一个可能make sense的决定。
我们会搞清楚事情的所有真相吗?不会。
FACT OF LIFE #3: We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.
尊重习惯
习惯是我们的朋友,我们不用反复琢磨也能知道:报纸上字体越大意味着重要性越大;一个大的标题下面的部分往往是为了解释这个大标题的文章;一张照片下面的文字一般都是解释这张照片的,等等。Conventions are your friends At some point in our youth, without ever being taught, we all learned to read a newspaper. Not the words, but the conventions. We learned, for instance, that a phrase in very large type is usually a headline that summarizes the story underneath it, and that text underneath a picture is either a caption that tells me what it’s a picture of, or—if it’s in very small type—a photo credit that tells me who took the picture.
这样的习惯在我们接受之后很快被复用到生活的其他领域中。This adoption process takes time, but it happens pretty quickly on the Internet, like everything else. For instance, enough people are now familiar with the convention of using a metaphorical shopping cart on e-commerce sites that it’s safe for designers to use a shopping cart icon without labeling it “Shopping cart.” 比如在网络上,我们所有人都已经对“购物车”这个概念、乃至图标非常熟悉了,不管在什么网站上,只要看到这个图标,我们就知道这是我们结账用的,网站甚至不用费劲地在这个图表旁边标注“购物车”三个字,这就是习惯。
不要随便打破习惯。We also take it for granted that the name of a building will be above or next to its front door. In a grocery store, we expect to find signs near the ends of each aisle. In a magazine, we know there will be a table of contents somewhere in the first few pages and page numbers somewhere in the margin of each page—and that they’ll look like a table of contents and page numbers. Think of how frustrating it is when one of these conventions is broken (when magazines don’t put page numbers on advertising pages, for instance). Navigation conventions for the Web have emerged quickly, mostly adapted from existing print conventions. They’ll continue to evolve, but for the moment these are the basic elements:
如何结合使用习惯和创新?My recommendation: Innovate when you know you have a better idea (and everyone you show it to says “Wow!”), but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.
别整那些没用的!Happy Talk
“这是最棒的社交网站!”作者把这些放在网站首页却又基本上不包含任何信息的自吹自擂的话叫做“Happy talk”。Unfortunately, the effect is as if a book publisher felt obligated to add a paragraph to the table of contents page saying, “This book contains many interesting chapters about _____, _____, and _____. We hope you enjoy them.”
Happy talk is like small talk—content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can—and should—eliminate as much happy talk as possible.但大多数用户打开你的网页或者app不是为了看你这句话的,他们为的是服务。所以类似的Happy talk,请越少越好。
对于产品人员来说,切忌陷入自己的语言构成的世界里。比如,我们常常会听到一些“术语”,比如“加载”etc。然而作者提出:点击根本不会带来“加载”或者“展示”,对于用户来说 clicking a link doesn’t “load” or “display” another page—it “takes you to” a page.
The name needs to match what I clicked. Even though nobody ever mentions it, every site makes an implicit social contract with its visitors: The name of the page will match the words I clicked to get there. In other words, if I click on a link or button that says “Hot mashed potatoes,” the site will take me to a page named “Hot mashed potatoes.”
Because it’s so easy to forget that the Web experience is often more like being shanghaied(有趣的词) than following a garden path.
Trunk test 如何对你的网站首页做测试?
以下是步骤 Here’s how you perform the trunk test:
Step 1 Choose a page anywhere in the site at random, and print it.
Step 2 Hold it at arm’s length or squint so you can’t really study it closely.
Step 3 As quickly as possible, try to find and circle each item in the list below. (You won’t find all of the items on every page.) Here’s one to show you how it’s done.
CIRCLE:
1. Site ID 网站名称
2. Page name 页面标识
3. Sections and subsections 分栏
4. Local navigation 页面引导
5. “You are here” indicator(s) 你在这里
6. Search 搜索框
网站的首页:不要自嗨
As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:
在这里再强调一下,不要再用 mission statement 也就是你们公司的员工守则上的文字——不要把他们放在你的网站首页上了。这里是面向消费者的,不是公司内网。
Don’t use a mission statement as a Welcome blurb. Many sites fill their Home page with their corporate mission statement that sounds like it was written by a Miss America finalist. “XYZCorp offers world-class solutions in the burgeoning field of blah blah blah blah blah….” Nobody reads them.
在你的网站名称旁边,可以补一句广告语。好的广告语 Good taglines convey differentiation and a clear benefit.
但同样,这一句广告语不是一句motto,注意这一句话要体现的是价值(Value Proposition)。Don’t confuse a tagline with a motto, like “We bring good things to life,” “You’re in good hands,” or “To protect and to serve.” A motto expresses a guiding principle, a goal, or an ideal, but a tagline conveys a value proposition. Mottoes are lofty and reassuring, but if I don’t know what the thing is, a motto isn’t going to tell me. > Good taglines are personable, lively, and sometimes clever. Clever is good, but only if the cleverness helps convey—not obscure—the benefit.
一个产品到底在首页增加多少元素,才能成为一款烂产品?
网站首页是公司各个部门争夺的阵地。然而问题在于 the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren’t shared equally. The section that’s being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.
一个好的产品经理应该好好控制他们的首页。Preserving the Home page from promotional overload requires constant vigilance 警觉, since it usually happens gradually, with the slow, inexorable addition of just…one…more…thing. All the stakeholders need to be educated about the danger of overgrazing the Home page, and offered other methods of driving traffic, like cross-promoting from other popular pages or taking turns using the same space on the Home page.
不要让你的团队陷入“宗教式的讨论”
Most teams end up spending a lot of precious time rehashing the same issues over and over. 没错,他们反复讨论的都是同样的问题,然而他们不会有答案。
这类无意义的讨论很像“宗教辩论”,因为每个人都认为自己的神才是真正的神。I usually call these endless discussions “religious debates,” because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important (whether it’s attaining eternal peace, governing effectively, or just designing Web pages). And, like most religious debates, they rarely result in anyone involved changing his or her point of view. 到最后,一个佛教徒不会因为一个基督徒反复和他说基督的伟大而就抛弃他的佛祖的。
很多产品的功能增加得其实非常random,比如 I once saw a particularly puzzling feature on the Home page of a prominent—and otherwise sensibly designed—site. When I asked about it, I was told, “Oh, that. It came to our CEO in a dream, so we had to add it.” True story.
你也遇到过?
没有一个用户名叫Average User
很多人喜欢去推测用户到底想什么。 In fact, all of the time I’ve spent watching people use the Web has led me to the opposite conclusion: all Web users are unique, and all Web use is basically idiosyncratic 独特的.
作者认为,可能根本不存在一个“Average User”(普通用户),没有这档子事儿。And the worst thing about the myth of the Average User is that it reinforces the idea that good Web design is largely a matter of figuring out what people like. 这个概念可能非常诱人,但你想多了。It’s an attractive notion: either pulldowns are good (because most people like them), or they’re bad (because most people don’t). You should have links to everything in the site on the Home page, or you shouldn’t. Menus on the top work better than menus down the side. Frames, pages that scroll, etc. are either good or bad, black or white. The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested. 你所能够做的不是根据普通用户来判断这个功能要还是不要,你要做的是反复的测试。
所以以后大家再讨论问题的时候,不要总是坚持自己代表的是Average User了,那会让你的讨论陷入无意义。“Do most people like pulldown menus?” The right kind of question to ask is “Does this pulldown, with these items and this wording in this context on this page create a good experience for most people who are likely to use this site?”
Repeat after me: Focus groups are not usability tests.
请记住,测试的意义并非在于证明谁的观点对、谁的观点错,而是要给你的判断提供insight。The point of testing is not to prove or disprove something. It’s to inform your judgment.
本书已读完一半。
2016.04.03
本周继续阅读《Don’t Make Me Think》这本书。后半部分总体来说有价值的内容不多,从70%的部分开始基本上是打酱油了。
紧接着上次的“测试”话题。
有关用户可用性的测试,一个人尽皆知的秘密就是:这种测试,不管你测的是什么人,其实结果差别不会太大。
对于的大多数人来说,测试的终极目标就是让相应的人的出相应的结论,他们即便知道的是最基本的、也够了。其实如果你测试的人足够多,你所得出的成绩曲线将是非常拟合的。换句话说,你要尽力去找能代表你的audience的用户,但也别在这一棵树上吊死。
测试什么时候开始?
越早越好。作者认为,在你开始设计自己的产品之前,你甚至就应该开始研究竞争对手的产品了。他们可是是你真实的竟对,或者他们只是在风格、组织架构或性能上和你脑中的这个新产品有异曲同工治疗罢了。Before you even begin designing your site, you should be testing comparable sites. They may be actual competitors, or they may be sites that are similar in style, organization, or features to what you have in mind.
对于竟对的产品,不妨自己亲自去看看或者用用,发现什么东西是ok的、什么是跑不通的。这相当于是别人免费帮你搞了一个测试的靶子和案例。
Cubicle Test 格子间测试
作者还提到了格子间测试,意思就是,你在做任何新功能的时候,不妨将他们直接show给你隔壁格子间坐着的同事,询问他们对你的新功能的看法,看看他们是否能够理解你的产品意图。Whenever you build a new kind of page—particularly forms—you should print the page out and show it to the person in the next cubicle and see if they can make sense out of it. This kind of informal testing can be very efficient, and eliminate a lot of potential problems.
抵制增加功能的冲动
这一点我们应该时刻警惕,Resist the impulse to add things. When it’s obvious in testing that users aren’t getting something, most people’s first reaction is to add something, like an explanation or some instructions.大多数人在发现自己的用户无法理解某件事的时候,第一本能就是:我们去增加这个功能、或者我们去增加那个功能!但事实上很多事胡,正确的解决办法是把那些混淆视听的功能/意义移除,而不是增加一个新的distraction。
对于产品经理来说,你们要将一切“增加新功能”的说辞换一种理解的方式。很多人都会说, “I’d like it better if it could do x.”然而产品经理对这样的话要尤其保持警惕。如果你仔细研究,你会发现他们即使有了x,也不会切换去使用。they’re just telling you what they like.
说到底,web usability的本质就是Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy. Doing the right thing—being considerate of the user.
Usability is Common Sense,然而常识也需要某个人为你一语道破
《Don't Make Me Think》热门书评
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我给了差评
160有用 94无用 蒋我白 2008-10-17
2 stars其实挺不错的一本书,但我给了差评,只因为对中国大陆的web设计师来说,这书几乎一点用都没有。不信?请对照着这本书看把这本书推荐给你的豆瓣网。哦是的一眼看上去你知道自己在“豆瓣”,你也看到了“标签式导航”,可能也有“视觉流”……但是说实在话,我从事web2.0不是一天两天了,豆瓣早在他声...
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别让我思考,和广告牌设计
66有用 19无用 Windy 2006-08-12
这本书的特点,首先是短小精悍。拿在手里就能感觉到,200页的篇幅,一点都不会罗嗦,一个中午,或许临睡前,甚至在飞机上,上下班途中,你就有可能把它一口气读完(怕最有可能的是拿到书以后就爱不释手地读下去了)。然后呢,它还有一些很有意思的地方。例如,每一章的开头,用了一页全红的纸张,这样,拿着它,想看看哪...
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推荐一本关于网站设计的好书
38有用 5无用 Yining 2006-10-26
《Don’t Make Me Think》是一本非常非常好的书(原书的第一和第二版我都买了,据说第三版快要出来),现在出了中文版,当然要买一本收藏,再给公司买了一本,推荐给同事们,并要求程序员都看至少一遍。在书店里翻这本书时,第一个发现就是它非常忠实原著(中文版是基于英文第二版),包括从内到外的Lo...
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读书笔记
15有用 2无用 吴正平 2007-10-01
原作者: Steve Krug原作网站: http://www.sensible.com/译者: Windy 蒋芳译者简历: http://windyj.wealink.com译者博客: http://dedream.blogbus.comACM SIGCHI: http://sigchi.org/...
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边做边看,你会学得更多
15有用 1无用 jumpman23 2006-09-14
看了上面很多朋友的评论,都很中肯,毕竟这本书在业界内已经传了很久,大家都很期望了。不过有些朋友说书中的道理很多都是比较平白无奇的,或者说不用作者告知我们都会去考虑的,我很明白大家的感受,那是因为没有一边跟着项目,一边研读此书。最近一直在做一个项目,公司领导很注重用户体验问题,特意找此书来学习,并结合...
书名: Don't Make Me Think
作者: [美] Steve Krug
出版社: New Riders Press
副标题: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
出版年: 2000-10-13
定价: USD 35.00
装帧: Paperback
ISBN: 9780789723109