What Examples Does Don T Make Me Think Book Use To Explain Design?
2026-08-02 00:09:43
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3 Answers
Owen
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Photographer
Honestly, a lot of the examples feel dated now—we're talking early 2000s web design. But the core lessons are still weirdly relevant. He spends a good chunk on form design, like those registration pages that ask for your 'User ID' in one box and then 'Login Name' in the next, as if they're different things. It's a perfect, simple illustration of creating unnecessary questions in a user's head.
He also uses street signs and appliance controls as real-world parallels. Like, a poorly designed remote with identical, unlabeled buttons versus a well-designed one where the power button is distinct and separate. It translates the digital problem into something physical you can almost feel in your hands. Makes you realize bad design is everywhere, not just on screens.
2026-08-04 18:41:26
16
Owen
Longtime Reader
Assistant
Krug dives right in with some classic, almost painfully relatable web blunders to get his point across. He brings up those horrid homepages crammed with dense paragraphs that scream 'About Us' and 'Our Mission'—you know the type, where you can't actually find anything you need. He uses a bank website's login process as a prime specimen, where the steps are scattered and the labels make zero sense to a normal person trying to transfer money. It’s this low-stakes dissection of everyday frustration that makes the whole 'don’t make me think' mantra click.
Another set of examples sticks with me because they’re so visual. He contrasts clean, obvious navigation tabs with those ambiguous, cleverly named links that force you to pause and decipher. There's a whole bit about e-commerce category pages, where a confusing hierarchy means you click 'Accessories' hoping for phone cases but end up in a section for garden hose attachments. He doesn't just say 'be clear'; he shows the exact moment a user’s brain has to work, and how that tiny friction costs a site its credibility. I finished that chapter and immediately started side-eyeing every 'Submit' button on the internet.
2026-08-05 12:59:48
9
Delaney
Plot Detective
Chef
The grocery store analogy is what I always come back to. Krug describes a site where you’re looking for pasta sauce, but it’s filed under 'Pantry Staples' instead of 'Pasta & Sauces.' You just stand there in the digital aisle, confused. He uses these mundane, task-based scenarios to show that if a design doesn’t match the user’s existing mental model, it fails. It’s not about art; it’s about not making people guess where the marinara is.
2026-08-07 15:09:41
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This book completely changed how I look at the stuff I build at work. I'm a developer who used to think cool animations and clever interactions were the goal. Then I read 'Don't Make Me Think' and it was like a slap on the forehead. Steve Krug's whole point is that a website shouldn't be a puzzle. If a user has to spend even a second wondering where to click or what a label means, you've already failed. It drilled into me that my job isn't to be clever, it's to be invisible—to create a path so obvious that people glide through it without noticing the design at all.
My biggest takeaway was the 'trunk test' idea. Can you look at a page for five seconds, then look away and still explain its purpose? I run that test on every mockup now. It forces you to cut the clutter and make the one thing the user needs to do scream at them from the page. It’s not about dumbing things down; it’s about respecting people’s time and mental energy. The book gave me a shared language with our designers, too—now we can just say 'this fails the trunk test' and we all know exactly what needs fixing.
The first thing that struck me about Steve Krug's book is how it punctures the myth that good design has to be complicated. He lays out this incredibly simple, foundational idea: a website or app shouldn't require its users to puzzle things out. If they have to stop and think 'what does this button do?' or 'where do I go next?', the design has already failed. That single principle seems obvious once you hear it, but it's wild how many products violate it constantly.
His whole argument boils down to removing mental friction. Everything from clear visual hierarchies and consistent navigation to plain language is just a tactic to achieve that one goal. It's not about making things 'dumb', it's about respecting the user's time and cognitive load. Reading it made me look at every login page and checkout process I encounter with a much more critical eye. I finally understood why some sites feel effortless while others feel like a chore.
The question made me pull my battered copy off the shelf, the spine cracked on Chapter 6. Yeah, it’s fine for beginners, but maybe not the first book I’d hand someone now. Krug’s style is wonderfully straightforward and his core argument that good design shouldn’t require thought is timeless. I learned a ton from it early on.
That said, some examples feel a bit dated, and a complete newbie in 2024 might miss context for certain web conventions he takes for granted. It’s a foundational text, like learning grammar before you write a novel. You should read it, but pair it with something more contemporary about digital product thinking to bridge the gap. I still think about his lawnmower navigation test all the time.
Norman's 'The Design of Everyday Things' was a total game-changer for how I approach UX. The concept of affordances really stuck with me—I now obsess over making sure buttons LOOK clickable, icons intuitively suggest their function, and navigation feels like second nature.
One project where this hit home was redesigning a banking app's transfer flow. We added clear visual cues (like shadow effects on tappable elements) and immediate feedback (subtle vibrations on press) to mimic physical interactions. The error prevention principles also led us to implement confirmation dialogs for irreversible actions. It's wild how much smoother the experience became just by treating digital interfaces like tangible objects.