Steve Krug

Episode 15
Brave UX

Why Our Work in UX Will Never Be Done

In this episode of Brave UX, Steve Krug reflects on 30+ years of contribution to the field of UX, including two best-selling books, in this wide-ranging conversation about usability testing, cross-functional collaboration and influencing stakeholders.

Highlights include:

How did you present the findings of your first UX research report?
What is the greatest usability challenge we face as a society?
What do you do when people don't see the value of user testing?
Have we seen the end of the usability consultant?
Why should we make recruiting for usability tests easier?

March 23, 202101:16:56

Listen on:

Who is Steve Krug?

Steve is a former usability consultant and author of the world-famous UX book, “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web (and Mobile) Usability”, which is now in its third edition and has sold over 600,000 copies - in 20 languages.

For over 25 years Steve worked as as usability consultant, through his firm Advanced Common Sense, where he helped clients including Apple, Bloomberg, Lexus, NPR, and the International Monetary Fund, to remove friction from experiences.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Steve Krug. Yes, the Steve Krug as in the one who wrote the world famous UX book, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Usability, which is now in its third edition and has sold over 600,000 copies in 20 languages. First published in 1999. Don't Make Me Think, is still considered to be essential reading for anyone entering the field of user experience. Steve is also the author of Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do It Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, an excellent, practical, and incredibly useful how to book for anyone who wants to learn and improve their usability testing skills. For over 25 years, Steve worked as a usability consultant through his firm, Advanced Common Sense, where he helped clients including Apple, Bloomberg, Lexus, NPR, and the International Monetary Fund to remove friction from experiences. Now he spends most of his time writing or watching old movies on TV when he should be writing. Those were his words, not mine. He's an exceedingly generous contributor to the field. He says what he thinks and he's here with me today. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Krug:
Hi. Nice to be here. Or I mean in my basement, but nice to meet you
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well, it's great to have you here and obviously thoroughly enjoyed researching for this conversation. I mean, your experience in the field and contribution to the field, as I said, is almost unparalleled. Hundreds of thousands of people have really come to understand the power of UX and usability through your works. And when I was looking back at your history and particularly the illustrative style of the books that you've written, you were a child in the 1950s and sixties and you can really see that come through in those illustrations. Who was Don Herbert and what influence did he have on you?
Steve Krug:
Don Herbert? Yeah he had a TV show, a Saturday morning TV show called Watch Mr. Wizard and he was Mr. Wizard. And the premise of the TV show was that he brought two neighborhood children into his home workshop or laboratory and taught them scientific principles. So he would do things like the experiment where you hang a bowling ball from a wire on a wire from the ceiling and you have little Billy stand back aways from where it's hanging and you pull the ball back so it's right up against his chin chin and you let it go, you go to let it go and you say, do you think if I let this go, it's ever, it's gonna come back further than where I let it go from and let it go. And obviously it doesn't kill him. But he was great at teaching scientific principles and I loved it.
I was like really fascinated by electricity and science and I just thought it was wonderful. It was one of my favorite shows. And so I say that as much as I ever had a career objective, it was to get his job when he retired, cuz I just thought that was the best job. And the interesting thing is he actually never retired [laugh]. He did it for years and then he stopped doing it and then many years later in the early nineties he came back and started doing it again and did it for a couple years. And then when he did finally retire a guy named Bill Nye, the science guy did the same thing and it was essentially the same show except without the school
Brendan Jarvis:
Kids. Lucky for Don Herbert when he made his comeback, he didn't actually take his job. But it did make me wonder because one of your hallmarks when you give talks about usability testing is to give the live demo. And I wondered if Don Herbert was the inspirational part thereof of the live demo.
Steve Krug:
I never thought of that, but I probably had a hand in it. And I love doing the live demos. I think the live demo, the live demo is partly because seeing if you haven't watched a usability test before, seeing one is pretty eye opening. I find it's very iron. And so it always seemed to me to be the best way to start off. And you talk about it cuz you'd have people who hadn't seen one and it's like you do a 10 minute usability test and they're sitting there going, oh my God, that was like, he didn't do anything. And yet [laugh], you learned an enormous amount in 10 minutes about the thing that they were doing the demo test on. So it was very Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
You like Mr. Magician to them it sort ofhow not tell.
Steve Krug:
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I used to bring somebody up if I was doing the workshop, I would bring somebody up from the audience and actually do the, we've never met before kind of thing just like a magician. It really, really was like that. And one of the things that was always interesting to me was after I've been doing them for some years, I was at a conference and mentioned it, mentioned that I did them in a talk and a whole bunch of people who were UX profession UX didn't exist at time. This is still usability days. [affirmative] came up to me afterwards and several of them said do you actually do that? You do a live demo? It's like, it's isn't that risky? And I was like, no. The thing is, the lovely thing about it is it always works, even if it's a bad test, even if it's a bad participant, as long as the audience can hear and understand them, it works perfectly. It works exactly as well as you need it to. So
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], fast forward roughly 40 years, it's 1989 and you get started in UX by doing contextual inquiry for semantics utilities division. Before we get into that specific part of your experience, what did your professional journey look like up until that point?
Steve Krug:
Yeah, it was, as my son would say, random, that was very rare [laugh], but it's not quite what he means by random. I got an English lit degree in college, which I proudly can say I've never made any use of it all or perceived any benefit to me from it and the rest of my life. So that's just by way of encouraging people who feel like, oh, I got this degree and I dunno if I'm ever gonna use it. Yeah, maybe not. [laugh] and [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
College was maybe a little less expensive back when you got that degree though, right?
Steve Krug:
My, yes, tuition was like $2,100 a semester as opposed to now on average it would be like 50 to 75,000 a year. So yeah, would significantly less. And I think that included room board. So then I worked in a typesetting shop, friend friend line through odd series consequences had a top setting shop and I started off as a proof reader and then typesetting was getting computerized at the time and I was the person who was more interested in computers than anybody else. So I learned how to keep the computers running and taught everybody how to use them and whatnot. And that was how I really got into computers. And then I ended up doing tech writing for 10 years. I wrote manuals, user manuals because a friend of mine was a tech writer and she had a job that she didn't have time to do and she said, oh, you have an English degree, she didn't know it how to write and why don't you try this? So I did. And I ended up doing it for 10 years.
Brendan Jarvis:
So your degree did actually pay off in some way, shape or
Steve Krug:
Form in just that sense that it fooled somebody into that I could write which turned, which actually was true. I could write, but that had nothing to do with the degree. People asked me how do I get it, how do I get at the job and how do I get to the field or whatever. And the usual advice is, well you gotta network. And I realized that the truth of my career was I never networked. I would've been terrible at it. It was just, I'm completely temperamentally to it and would've found it embarrassing. And I realized that all the job changes that I got were through nepotism. That basically it was a friend or a family or somebody who suggested that I should try this. And so my advice to people looking for their careers now is develop friends who are smarter and more ambitious than you are and they'll get really good jobs and then they'll be looking around for somebody to hire or so, cuz I've been through a bunch of that and that was how I, that I got into the usability and the contextual inquiry was a friend of mine who was working for, he was working for Symantec actually first, and then later he worked for Apple and that was how he got ended up consulting for Apple.
Brendan Jarvis:
So never underestimate the power of good group of friends.
Steve Krug:
Yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you get to Symantec, it's 89. Yep. This is presumably your first foray into usability and UX. Did they hire you to do these contextual inquiries specifically?
Steve Krug:
They did. I mean, my into UX had started actually with my last tech writing job, which was right before that where the developers who were these wonderful people who ended up eventually doing two other, that startup failed, but they eventually ended up doing two other startups that changed industries. And I was writing manual for them. And they realized that because I was writing the manual, I was spending more time thinking about the interface than they were [laugh]. Basically, if you're writing a user guide for something, you're explaining where the interface doesn't work the way you would expect it to work. That's all you really, all you have to write [laugh]. And so they invited me to sit in on the design meetings for the interface [affirmative]. And that was how, that was the initial sort of segue. But then this friend of mine was working for Symantec and his boss basically said maybe we should know something about our users. We're trying to figure out what products we should develop. Maybe we should learn some more about our users. And so Richard said, well, I know this guy. And they hired me to do four or five interviews where I would go out and sit with somebody in their office space and talk to them about Symantec products and how they did their work and what they needed and whatever. And then I did a report and include, actually, I included and edited segment from a Marks brothers movie report, which was really nice. [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
What was the segment?
Steve Krug:
I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure. I don't know how I did that then because how would I have done the video anyway, I did took a six minute scene in a Marks with movie and edited down to about two. It was a scene from at the races where Groucho buys from Chico, I think it's actually pronounced Chico. Chico [affirmative] Chico was a racetrack tout and he was selling tip books. And so he sold one to Groucho and Groucho flips through the book and says, well, so what's, what does this mean? He says, oh, you need a code book. And he sells him a code book and tells him another book that he needs to there. And he ends up with a wheel power of full these books. And the point I was making was, this is kind of people's experience with these products is that they just are constantly having to learn more about the product just to get it to do what it was supposed to do in the first place.
Brendan Jarvis:
Really subtle.
Steve Krug:
So yeah, [laugh], it was really good. I still have it around someplace I think. And it was I guess that of, I guess that was that's as close as I can think of to something that indicated how I was gonna turn out. That was kind of still what I do to this day is taking that kind of attitude towards
Brendan Jarvis:
It. But do you recall the reaction when you played the video?
Steve Krug:
They thought it was funny and they were very pleased. Like it was an interesting presentation. So there you go. [affirmative] bored at work. So [laugh] because his boss liked that so much. Somebody I don't know who it was, said, well maybe we should try some of this usability testing stuff. And I hadn't done any at that point. And I actually just dug I bought Jacob Nielsen's early book, [affirmative] Usability Engineering where he describes usability testing. And I bought myself on that and did some usability tests for them. And that was really good. And they liked that. So then I became a consultant. Do
Brendan Jarvis:
You have a relationship with Jacob?
Steve Krug:
I do. I haven't seen him for many years now. I mean, partly because we would see each other at conferences. And Jacob, I went to the Usability Professionals conference more often. Jacob than Jacob, he didn't go every year but when he was there, we would get together. And I have always enjoyed Jacob. I like Jacob but I was indebted to him. I mean, sort learned in the first place, learned what I knew from him. And he's obviously written tons of useful stuff about all of it. And the biggest difference was he was a high end consultant. And I
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] [laugh]. You were an aspiring high end consultant. I,
Steve Krug:
Well, I don't know if I aspired to be a high end consultant that felt like that was always beyond me. You know, had to be able to go in and sell to business people to be a high end consultant and networking. I of knew this was not in my portfolio. I would not be good at doing that. And it would require completely different kind of confidence than I had. I had a lot of confidence in what I did, but I wouldn't have had confidence doing that. It would've been way too much stress. So, mm-hmm.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], thinking about more recent times, I believe your son Harry study user interface design at the grad program at Bentley in Boston. How much?
Steve Krug:
Yeah, UX. Really? Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, UX. Yeah. How much of a role did you play or your influence play in his decision to pursue that course of study?
Steve Krug:
I would characterize it. I was shocked when he said he was interested in doing it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Why were you shocked
Steve Krug:
On the, I don't know. Would you wanna do what your father did?
Brendan Jarvis:
I
Steve Krug:
Mean, maybe, but somehow it just never occurred to me that he would [affirmative] again, this was a joke, but what I like to say was that I thought part of his reason for being interested in it was that his office where he did his homework and projects and whatnot, was right outside my office in the basement here. And I assumed that over the years he came to the conclusion that I didn't really do any work, at least not any hard work. And that made it seem like possibly an attractive career [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
And what's his reality been?
Steve Krug:
It's done some work [affirmative] and then decided to do the program Bentley and finished the program Evently sort of right before C,
Brendan Jarvis:
So Oh right. Yeah.
Steve Krug:
He's currently looking for a job.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, if there are any UX hiring managers listening to the show today, if you want a crew on the team, there's one that would be keen to hear from you.
Steve Krug:
Very nice. He's very funny and he's sharp as attack and I would recommend him highly [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
No bias at all, but I'm sure it's highly accurate.
Steve Krug:
No bias. No bias intended. And now he's a great kid. So
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you think he feels being in the same field as his father, someone like yourself who's had such a noticeable impact on UX?
Steve Krug:
Oddly the few times we've talked about it or somebody else has mentioned it my impression doesn't bother him at all. He's completely tranquil with it. [affirmative]. In fact, he was, when he was in class at Bentley we were both very impressed that almost nobody made the connection. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Really?
Steve Krug:
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that kind of stunning? I think it came up in one or two classes at some point it came up, but so he didn't have to think about it at all. But no, I've never gotten the sense that he would mind that at all. He feels pressured by it. He's his own person.
Brendan Jarvis:
Say if you've been someone who's effectively for a large part of their career being paid to find problems and experiences and things on the screen mainly. Yeah. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief as you go through everyday life and everyday experiences? Do you see problems that other people don't see in normal things?
Steve Krug:
No, not quite where I thought you were headed [laugh]. No, I don't think I run into enough problems without looking for trouble. And I feel like they're the same problems everybody else runs into.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah.
Steve Krug:
What I suspected you might be about to ask was doesn't it make me crazy? Or, so people ask me sometimes, are you seeing usability problems all the time? And so it's really frustrating for you, which is not true. The usability problems are frustrating, but no more than for everybody else. And maybe I'm even a little more tolerant because I kind of know how hard it is to get it. All right.
Brendan Jarvis:
But well let's pick up on that topic because there's something else that I know that isn't easy for you, although you've done a whole lot of it, including writing two critically acclaimed books and the field of usability and UX. People that are listening might find it interesting to hear that you really loathe writing. Why is that?
Steve Krug:
Because it's really hard work. [laugh] really hard work [laugh]. There are people who say, if it's not really hard work, then you're not doing it well. That's the only reason why it would not be really hard work. Because it amounts to thinking and thinking is hard work, thinking clearly is really hard work. And the other part of it, it's is then thinking clear and figuring out what you mean. And then coming up with a really good explanation for it, which is the Mr. Wizard part. He figured out how to make the principles clear and that's clarity is really tough. So over the years, I've always said that I hated writing and that I can understand why anybody would write unless they had at least a metaphorical gun, a headline had a dead deadline pointed at their head. Cuz I just find it so painful. But I had a breakthrough sometime in the last five years when I suddenly realized that I don't actually hate writing that much. What I hate is procrastinating. And for me, 90% of writing is procrastinating, [laugh] is, and procrastinating is really painful. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Two sides of the same coin. It's interesting that you managed to come to that realization and differentiate between the writing and the procrastination.
Steve Krug:
Yeah, I mean, well I've been working as, from looking at my site, I've been working for years in the background on a book about writing, about making life easier, which is my main interest at the moment. And I ended up thinking about procrastination a lot [affirmative] to the point where I have a 80 page draft that's some text and a lot of notes about procrastination for what could it most be, like a 10 page chapter on procrastination [affirmative]. And I've been working on it for a long time.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well that's irony right there.
Steve Krug:
We're not working on it for a long time. Yeah, the irony, it's really thick. So
Brendan Jarvis:
What did you realize about procrastination?
Steve Krug:
A lot of things, actually. Probably the main one, people don't have to buy the book. The main one is you have to get over the idea that you're gonna fix it. You have to get over the idea that you are going to stop procrastinating. And part of the reason for that is that it's not one thing, a number of things working at the same time. And so if you read an article about procrastination, it says, oh, do this set aside a time every day when you're gonna do and just do a little bit every day. And the fact is, any of those things will, it's kind of dieting. Any of them will work for a little while and they'll stop working. This is the rule and part of the reason why they stop working is because while you maybe successfully tamping down one of the things that makes you procrastinate, you've got like six others and so one of the others will surface. And then the thing that you're doing will stop working because the other one will become in the forefront and will think that you, you stop procrastinating because that thing that you were trying didn't work. But it's really because one of your other reasons for procrastinating, procrastinating became more activated.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a really real human behavior, isn't it? To put off doing what needs to be done or what you believe needs to be done. Yeah,
Steve Krug:
Yeah. And most people I think suffer from it to some degree. And part of it is that we tend to believe a lot of wrong things about it. A lot of people believe, as I have believed at various times in my life that you're putting it off because you're lazy cuz you don't wanna do hard work. And that's not it. That's just not it. I mean, maybe for some people, I'm sure there's some percentage of people who that that's true for, but really what it is is you're putting off feeling bad, putting off things that make you feel bad, whether it's feeling that you're not gonna be able to do it or the feeling that you're not gonna do a good enough job or whatever, that it's a way of avoiding putting it off as a way of avoiding those feelings and just understanding that actually there's a bunch of things. I think just understanding them helps some, as I say, not gonna fix it, but it can make it better. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I, I'd wondered if you hated writing so much because of the time you spent writing technical manuals?
Steve Krug:
Technical manuals were a nightmare. I mean, technical manuals for me when I started doing them, I would be so miserable because I had no idea how to do it, no idea how to get started and no sense at all that I actually could get it done. No sense that I could get it done. And it wasn't until I did my last manual that I finally felt like, oh, I know how to do this. This is something I can do. And that took eight, 10 years to get to that point. So yes, that's mostly about avoiding bad feelings. And the reason why we do it so much is because it works. It works until it doesn't work, it works until either that the sense of that things are coming at you and you're gonna be in trouble outweighs the relief of not doing it [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Then you have to act.
Steve Krug:
Yeah, yeah. Or yeah. And for me it was always for me, people talk about deadlines and there's actually this wonderful from Douglas Adams from who wrote Hitchhiker's Guy to the Galaxy. I have a very famous quote which is I, I'll get one of the words wrong, but something like I love deadlines, I like the worrying sound they make as they go by
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Steve Krug:
Cuz he was notorious deadlines by years. His second book I think was six years late or something like that,
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. So it'd be unfair for me then to ask you whether you've put a self-imposed deadline on your,
Steve Krug:
About the nice things about this project and why I'm, I'm still happy about it is I have no deadline, nobody else is involved. My self-imposed deadline is that I hope to get it done while I still have enough brain cells left to get it done. [laugh]. I think it would be a great book. I really am very enthused about it and every time I go to work on it, I'm very enthused about it, which is kind of remarkable. I, there's a part of me in my gut that really feels like, oh, this would be a really good book. So of course there's a huge distance between thinking it would be a really good book and having it written
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], well you wrote two really good books already. I mean I think no one could argue against that. And you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the writing process that the thinking is actually the really hard part. And then shaping that thinking into a condensed form that you can then convey it with meaning to other people so that they can then do something with it is something that you've done exceptionally well.
Steve Krug:
And thank you I, I'm fortunate enough that I actually believe that I'm very grateful that things have worked out that way. Hold that thought cuz I just remembered when I was thinking about deadlines, which is that for me, deadlines, it deadlines weren't useful at all because I wouldn't kick into gear when the deadline was approaching and I knew that I was about to disappoint the publisher or miss some date that they needed to do for the printer or whatever, that wouldn't help at all. It was only once all of that had been passed and I had completely messed things up, that I would finally lapse into enough panic that I would actually get it done. So I was really worst case scenario and I feel very bad. I wanna apologize in the book for all the people who I have made miserable [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
On the record now
Steve Krug:
[laugh]. Oh they know. I, they know. I just feel like they owe, they deserve another huge apology.
Brendan Jarvis:
So thinking about your first two books, yeah. I know you've done some revisions to, don't make me think already. Yep. Is there anything, thinking about those books now that you wish you had included or would add if you felt compelled to do any further revisions?
Steve Krug:
Honestly, I, it's kinda satisfying cuz I can't say that I've thought of anything since either or The most recent revisions, as you say. One was just the rocket surgery, I just did the first edition and that made me think I did, I don't know, six years ago, I think I did the third edition, something like that. I can't say that there's anything that after the fact I thought, oh, I should have said that back then. It's all the only things that I wanna do are things that either have changed to some extent or that I've sort of learned more. But it wasn't like there was anything that I should have known at the time that I feel any regret for not having done and doing it. A new addition of a book is, it's a ridiculous amount of work. It seems like it should be relatively easy but if you're doing it halfway decently, it's a ridiculous amount of work.
So that's, and also as of a couple years ago, my thinking was always, there's not really that much that I could add at this point. There's not really that much that I would change or could add that would be useful enough to bother doing it. But then somehow in the last year and a half, maybe starting before without thinking about it, I started, things started occurring to me that I could do it or ways that I actually could update them that hopefully might not be that much work. Although inevitably it would end up being that much work. But I could fool myself into thinking it might not be that much work that would be worth doing. So now they've gone from, I don't see any reason to do that to, yeah, I probably should do that, but I'd rather do the writing book first, but maybe I should do one of them first. But I don't know.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you mentioned you were really proud of, don't make me think, and the numbers would suggest with over 600,000 copies sold that a lot of people found a lot of value in that book. It propelled you to be a household name in the UX community. Does that feel,
Steve Krug:
I like to characterize it as a relatively big fish in a very small pond. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, it's better to be a relatively big fish in a small pond than a very small fish in a lodge pond.
Steve Krug:
No, it's wonderful. I highly recommend it. I, I think being a big fish in a huge pond is, as we know is probably a nightmare [affirmative]. So this is probably the best of all possible worlds where I have people sending me email, lovely email all the time and it's like, what more could you ask for? That's so cool. Unless it was actually curing cancer or something that would be better [laugh], that would be much better. So no, I feel very fortunate to be in that position and I feel even more fortunate because I actually do, I kind of do agree, as I said earlier I think it's a really good book that's really nice. There are a lot of things about it that I know very much every once in a while I'll go back and look at and say, yeah, that was pretty good [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that must feel really good. And I noticed in your dedications to the book obviously and the first edition you dedicated to your mother and father and in the second edition you dedicated it to your big brother Phil. Yeah. What influence did Phil have on your life when you were growing up?
Steve Krug:
He tickled me a lot. [laugh], literally [laugh], the old big brother sits on you and tickles you mean. It was great to have a brother. I gonna say it was great to have a brother and he was nice to me when he didn't have to be I, my memory of myself as a kid is that I was a brat. I was really annoying. I have checklist with some neighbor, neighbor friends who said, no, not really. So I guess to some extent it's not true. But he was really good with me, he was really patient with me and that's huge, huge. And then he was also this incredibly decent person. So that's always nice to have people in your family who you think of as very decent. He worked, he was a legal services attorney in Harley Harlem for almost all of his career helping people not get evicted. And he was really hard working and he was impressive.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sounds like an amazing, amazing big brother. It's great to have people like that and your life look up too.
Steve Krug:
Yep.
Brendan Jarvis:
What is the single biggest lesson that you hope people take away after reading? Make me think,
Steve Krug:
Oh I guess that if you're building something that you, I mean it always comes down to usability testing, which probably shouldn't is if you, you're building something, then you are not gonna be able to see where it's gonna confuse people. It's not gonna confuse you too much about it. And if you really want it to work well, you have to put in that effort of, oh, watching some people try to use it because it will just improve it. You can improve it dramatically [affirmative] just by doing that. Mm-hmm Probably my biggest takeaway which is why the second book was about how to do usability testing cause they really do believe in it
Brendan Jarvis:
And that, have we gotten better or worse at this as a practice over the past 20 to 30 years?
Steve Krug:
The practice of doing usability testing, the practice of designing better stuff,
Brendan Jarvis:
Of making sure that we put things in front of our users and learn how to improve them and design them better.
Steve Krug:
I think that's become much more accepted thing. Certainly it was relatively rare for that to be part of the development process 20 years ago people did it but it was relatively rare. And one of the reasons why I did rocket surgery is cuz it was pretty much always handed off to consultants. So it was expensive. So you might do one round of usability testing during the development, the life cycle of a product. If you were a huge company, you were building a huge product and you'd pay for a bunch of rounds, but for the most part, if you weren't then you'd be lucky if you did it once. And I think that's changed. I think there are so many more people now who are in one way or another doing UX work and there is such a thing as enterprise UX and I don't know how many people are doing UX work now, but I'm sure it's five to 10 times as many as there were 20 years ago, probably 10 times as many as there were 20 years ago. People have considered themselves in some way doing UX work, so that's great. I'm still surprised at how much stuff is not what it should be. I'm surprised. I guess it's
Brendan Jarvis:
Not what surprises you in
Steve Krug:
Particular. It's not that hard to run into a usability problem. It's not that hard to run into a glaring usability problem. But I guess it's cuz people are building so much stuff. They're building far more stuff than they were 20 years ago.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have we seen the end of the usability consultant?
Steve Krug:
Well no. I mean they're called UX researchers now. They're called either they're UX researchers and UX designers. And it's hard to say what that really, really means. And from my perspective, it kind of all changed with Steve Jobs and the iPhone and the other products to a certain extent. But that Steve Jobs proved that by doing UX work you could make products better and sell more. And before that I don't think that was a belief that people had. In fact, I always used to say I didn't think that was ever gonna happen. I didn't think UX and usability was ever gonna become a required line item, top level line item in budgets the way marketing or whatever. But now just a lot, pretty good extent it has. It's like, I don't know any company of any size or even smaller companies that would think of partly to the lean movement. I, that certainly didn't hurt either. But I think it started with jobs and basically people said, oh we gotta get some of that stuff. They're making money with it. So
Brendan Jarvis:
We often think about UX and usability is making people's lives better and I believe firmly that 99% of practitioners in the field want to do that. But is there a dark side to usability and user experience?
Steve Krug:
Oh yeah. I think people are under pressure to this is one of the things they did talk about at some point years ago was I feel like it's one of the things that happened has happened to usability as if people under pressure to use user research for purposes that originally they were user advocates and now they're being asked to use user research for things that are not in the user's interest. How do we shave another fraction of a percent of clicks off of this? Whether it's good, whether it's in the user's interest or not. And I feel like that's what one of the things that, it's one of the unintended consequences when people say, oh well UX, okay UX stuff works. Then all of a sudden the people who have those impure motivations come out of the woodwork and they start leaning on the people doing the UX to do that. So yeah, there are certainly mean dark practices are a real thing and it's unfortunate and now, and so the backlash to that is a big surge in discussion of ethics in the UX field. So for the last three or four years that's become a hot conference topic
Is ethics.
Brendan Jarvis:
So I've heard you say that and I'm gonna quote you now that there, and I'm quoting now [laugh], there are really few absolute truths when it comes to usability and UX design. Yeah. What did you mean by that?
Steve Krug:
Well, I like the comic that I had in the book where people are trying to decide whether they should use pulldowns, the dropdowns in the interface. And it's like what they want is an answer that that dropdowns are good or dropdowns are bad. And the fact is, if you've been involved in any serious design process, it's all contextual. It's like dropdowns are not good everywhere and not bad everywhere. Depends on how much stuff you wanna put in the dropdown, how much space you have available on the page, how often the usually needs to interact with it. So there are very few hard, fast rules [affirmative] other than the kind of high level generic things like you need to make it as clear as possible. [laugh], you know need to keep the user aware of the status of the system at any given time. That needs to be transparent. And there are some of those basic principles that've been around for a long time, but they're just basic principles. And that's kind of it that people always want hard and fast rules. They want answers and there aren't that many answers. It's possible to get people, there are many things you can read that will suggest how to think about the answers, but you still have to think about them in your context. They're still making judgment calls.
Brendan Jarvis:
You still have to do the hard work, have
Steve Krug:
To do the hard work, you have to think about it [laugh] and hopefully you think about it with the user in mind.
Brendan Jarvis:
And so there's no better technique than to think about it with the user in mind than actually putting the user in front of something and observing them. So let's talk about testing.
Steve Krug:
Yeah, okay.
Brendan Jarvis:
Assuming you agree with that statement. No,
Steve Krug:
I do. It's one of the things I would like to add to, don't make me think it's not much, but it's kind of a diagram or both books actually. It's kind of a diagram showing how I think of the process that you've got the person in front of the screen doing a thing, they've got a speech balloon, what they're saying that you're listening to and they've got a thought balloon that kind of shows some idea of what it is that they're thinking about and what's puzzling them. But then there's also the people in the observation room of people watching the user and they've all got their own individual thought balloons and that basically they're all interpreting what they're hearing from the user differently based on they're filtering it through their experience. [affirmative], many of them will be useful. That's what you want. You want the whole team to be observing somebody actually having the experience and then filtering it through their understanding of, well what can we do technologically or what's the history of this? Or all of those things. So that's why the old model of, well we have a consultant come in and run the test and then they write a report and they draw conclusions is pretty lame. It doesn't really serve that same purpose of drawing on all the group experience.
But
Brendan Jarvis:
People that I talk to, practitioners and myself included, sometimes have difficulty convincing people that aren't core to the product to spectate or observe the tests,
Steve Krug:
Right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Short of compulsion, [laugh], how do you get people, how do you get people in the room?
Steve Krug:
Compulsion's always good if you can manage it. But I guess I probably, I don't know if I'm unrealistically optimistic about this, I kind of think that if you can get people, trick people into the room, then they will get it. They understand the value of it. But it's mostly people who haven't done it before who do not perceive the value in actually spending any time doing it. So I try to tell people, one thing you need to do is to get everybody to at least come to some that you'll make a certain number of converts, some unexpected based on the fact that they've seen. My favorite recommendation was always, if you're starting out introducing it to the team, then do a test of your competitors because everybody's interested in their competitors. And also you're not gonna make anybody look bad in house because you're not testing your stuff, you're testing their stuff.
So nobody's gonna be reluctant because they don't want their stuff to look bad and there's no reason why you can't do it if somebody's got a public facing site out there. You basically have perfect right to have some people try using it. So that's always been my main recommendation for basically tricking people into getting a taste for the process that forcing them is good. You know, can manage it. Probably not as good as other things. Great snacks, I recommend spend as much money as you can on snacks and lunch and whatever and just make it easy. That was part of the notion of rocket surgery was test once a month with three users because it's such a low bar for recruiting and the effort required to produce the tests that you'll keep doing it. Cuz the trick is, the problem is you won't keep doing it, that's the problem.
The problem is there's a tendency to have enthusiasm for it at first and then it gradually drifts off. And what you wanna do is establish that if this is our practice. And so if you do it once a month and you have three people, recruiting requirements are low, attendance is really easy. You're testing down the hall from where all these people are if any of us ever get back to working on site again. And then you do the debrief with everybody who came to them and they get to have a voice in that process. So to me that's like an ideal setup for a number of reasons. And it works remotely. It works just as well remotely, I mean almost as well. I'm not sure if the debriefing is gonna work quite as well. Haven't seen one. Somebody tried to do one in Zoom but as far as testing and observing the tests, it works fine. The only problem is that as with any remote thing, I mean I never do anything remote apart from something like this of course, where I don't end up drifting off and doing email after 15 minutes. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I haven't heard you typing on the keyboard. So I suppose, okay so far
Steve Krug:
[laugh], I have to imagine that you'd have a fair share of that with usability testing. So you have to keep it kinda crisp. It also makes it easier for people. It makes it easier. They can just sit at their desk and do it or you can actually record them and people can watch them at their leisure. Not that they will,
Brendan Jarvis:
But
Steve Krug:
Good.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, we'd be diluted to expect that people would be watching that over Netflix in the evening.
Steve Krug:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the maxims in rocket surgery is focus ruthlessly on solving the most important problems. [affirmative], how do you determine what that problem or problems are?
Steve Krug:
That's what I think of as the debriefing is that basically, in fact, I came up with a process for it that's in the book [affirmative], which just between you and me, although I have admitted this publicly before, I just made it up when I was writing the book, I [laugh] thought what would, based on what I've done and seen, done, what would be a good process that the point of which was to figure out what were the most significant problems and then figure out what you were gonna do about them. Cause I really do believe in this that part of the problem is that you tend to not focus on the most significant problems because they have a history and people believe that they're gonna be hard to solve or they believe that they're gonna be solved by the next round of technology that gets adopted or whatever.
None of which is ever true. And so that's why you go back to a site and you see the same really bad problem there that's been there for years, that's losing them money. I mean, I'm always appalled by that. I see something and I say, wait a minute, I ran this problem. It wasn't just cuz I did something stupid, I have to figure that at least 10% of the people who come through here run into that problem. And I'm not gonna give up just because I sort of whatever. But you have to figure that half those people are gonna give up because of that problem [affirmative]. And what does that mean in terms of money and in terms of satisfaction and whatever. Anyway so I made up that process which basically says while people are observing what they write down, they can keep as many notes as they want.
But what they write down for each participant that they observe is the three most significant problems that they actually observe that problem person run into. Not things that they thought about while that session was going on, but actual problems that they observed that that person had. And so you write down your three most significant, and so you end up with a sheet that's a handout that basically you end up writing down nine problems if you watch three tests. And then you bring that into the debriefing session and you go around and everybody gets, everybody picks from their nine, they picked the three that they thought were most significant and they contribute that. And you keep running tally on the board and you end up with some that have 20 check, 10 check boxes after check check marks after them cuz everybody thought that was a serious problem.
And you go around and everybody makes their contribution. And then based on that, you then reorder the list for what came across as the most serious problems. And then you work your way down that list saying, okay, what are we gonna do about this in the next month to take this out of the category of being a really serious problem into either being a problem that not many people have. It might still be serious, but almost nobody has it or that people still have, but it's not a serious problem for them anymore. And on it was, there's pretty much always something you can tweak in that situation to make that change. There may be some things that are just, they're like so God awful and so built into the core of the customer experience or the idea of the product that you can't tweak them. But I think there almost always is something that was my whole model for debriefing was you use it as a siv to make sure that you're only looking at the most serious problems. And I
Brendan Jarvis:
Love the maxim that you came up with for tweaking, which was when fixing problems always do the least that you can
Steve Krug:
Do. Yeah, [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
That's so important.
Steve Krug:
Exactly. Cuz you've seen people get sucked into redesigns when yes, the redesign would be nice, but you're not gonna end up doing it. But on the other hand, there is a tweak you could make. There's a simple change that you could make that would make things a lot better, wouldn't fix them, wouldn't be perfect, but would that improve the situation that you have? And if you know quickly right away. So I made that, but then I actually got a nice amount of feedback from people who said, yeah, we did the debriefing this way and worked really well. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I think that's coming back to that conversation we had earlier about the importance and the difficulty in doing the thinking and then distilling the thinking down into something that's useful for other people. And that's definitely proved to be something that's been really valuable for the community. When does it make sense to start doing usability testing
Steve Krug:
As early as possible? I always say if when it's never too early to start, if you've got a sketch of the homepage of this thing that's just a germ of an idea, then take that sketch, show it to some people and say, what do you think this is? What's your understanding of what this is and what you could do with it and what it's for? And if I always say, if their description, their description matches what you had in mind, then get a bigger napkin and keep sketching. But odds are that from showing it to five people and having them give you that description, you will have a light bulb go off over your head of, oh, right, that's not obvious that this is what we were doing with that. And how much time have you spent? None. And Jacob Nielson pointed out, he made the case years ago about, and he had ran the numbers for how much it costs to make changes later in the process as opposed to earlier in the process. And it's rid, it's ridiculous. It's purely logarithmic [laugh] in terms
Brendan Jarvis:
Of it's something that business people will understand.
Steve Krug:
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Steve, for some rapid fire questions.
Steve Krug:
Okay,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], [laugh], you had a very similar reaction to Laura when I asked this question.
Steve Krug:
Wait, we've already agreed that you can ask me about anything. So now I, you can ask me about anything and they're going to be rapid fire questions. This sounds like hazardous duty, but yeah, please
Brendan Jarvis:
Go ahead. Just seeking informed consent one might say,
Steve Krug:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
All right, so they're scenario based and let's just see how we go.
Steve Krug:
Oh
Brendan Jarvis:
Sure. So the first one is, a UX designer wants to usability test a prototype of a new feature, but they're having trouble finding the right participants. What should they do?
Steve Krug:
They should lower their standards. My answer to this [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
But the other people might not. Why should they lower their standards?
Steve Krug:
They should lower their standards because nothing should keep them from doing the testing. Recruiting is hard. Recruiting is the hardest part. And the more finicky you are about making sure that your participants are a perfect map onto your intended actual users, the harder recruiting tends to be. And it's the reason why people don't do more testing. And I would argue that the fact is that people who do this for a living know that you will still learn what you need to learn by testing is as much as you can have representative uses. You should, you should, but you, there's nothing wrong with having a mix of people who are representative users and people who are just spoonfed the information that they need to know that representative users would know that they don't know. It's nothing wrong with giving them clues with telling them, here's what you wanna do, here's what this thing typically costs, you know, can spoonfeed them whatever you need to spoon feed them.
But the fact is that the interface and the user experience should be so clear that even people who don't have the domain knowledge should be able to figure it out in most cases. And where there are cases where your people who aren't your intended audience can't figure it out, then you just do the thought experiment where you say, well, did they have a hard time not getting this because they were not actual users or because it's just confusing. And I would argue you can always answer that question really easily as long as you ask it. So there's nothing one of the things I did in rocket surgery I really like was I had an FAQ at the end of each chapter, which turns out to be a wonderful writing device because inevitably if you're writing something nonfiction like that, you end up with stuff that you can't quite fit in and you're gonna have to really work hard to come up with a rhetorical flow that will allow you to cover this point.
But on the other hand, if you have an FAQ at the end of the chapter, you just throw it there, [laugh] doesn't matter, you have to, don't go through all that writing struggle. But one of them was basically you're only testing three people, so it's not statistically significant. And my answer was, if somebody asked you that, somebody's gonna ask you and say, well, it's not specifically [inaudible]. And your answer should be, yep, absolutely. We're testing three, no statistical, no point in even gathering statistics. But the fact is people have been doing this for years and it works. It gets you the insights that you need and sort the same thing with representative users is it just works. I mean, come and watch some and you'll see that it works.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Yeah, hundred percent. But
Steve Krug:
The main thing that you wanna make the recruiting easier you want because difficult difficulty of recruiting is what will make you stop doing it. So then you've stopped. So there you're dead.
Brendan Jarvis:
So important. Yeah, very important.
Steve Krug:
These are all softballs, as we would say over here. They, they're like slow pitches. I was a be tricked [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I wouldn't do that to you. I wouldn't do that to you, Steve. I
Steve Krug:
Know you wouldn't. I know you
Brendan Jarvis:
Wouldn't. So number two, you're working on a non-screen based experience. In this case it's one that relies on speech as input. How should you approach evaluating its usability?
Steve Krug:
My problem is I have a hard time seeing how any, and I would have to, if I did do a third edition I don't make me think I would have to talk about UX and these different modalities. And that was one of the things that suddenly light bulb went over my head. I figured out how to do that without spending years doing it. But for me, my problem is, and I'm probably overemphasize this I'm probably biased, but I don't think there's that much difference. [affirmative], it's a speech interface basically. You come up with a task for them to do and you have them do the task and at the same time that they do the task, they do think aloud and they comment on what it was that they were trying to do and what they were thinking about and their reaction to what their response was from the system. That's it. I just don't difference in most of these modalities.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], why make it more complicated than it has to be at works? Observations powerful.
Steve Krug:
You're trying to get the same thing. You're trying to get them to share their internal, their thought process. You're trying to get them to do the thing and share their thought process. And from that, that's how you get the insights. I know, like I say, I may be biased, but it's just always struck me that way. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Are you ready for Yes. It's okay to be biased as long as you know that that's the case. Are you ready for softball number three?
Steve Krug:
Yes please.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay. You're a UX researcher in charge of usability testing of a product. How should you think about your role within the wider team?
Steve Krug:
Mean people are spending a ton of time talking about that now because so many teams now have UX people and they're trying to figure out, partly they're going through the whole land grab thing of trying to figure out, well, who actually gets to make the decisions here? [laugh], are the UX people allowed to tell us how it has to be designed? Or are we telling them? And that unfortunately that hasn't changed. It's still going on. In fact, probably becoming more intense because now they're the UX people actually have a seat at the table. And [affirmative] design has become such a freaking sloppy term these days. It's like, is everybody a designer? Is nobody a designer? I think those are the two options.
Brendan Jarvis:
You can thank 3M for that.
Steve Krug:
Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
The post-it notes, everyone's now a designer
Steve Krug:
[laugh] all you need a wall and some post-it notes. Pretty much I feel like that's such a large discussion. That's such a large topic that will only settle out over the next couple years. I don't know if there's even anything smart to say about that. I think you need to be respectful of other people's turf. You need to feel like, I guess I read something recently. It basically said you need to picture yourself as you're serving the process, you're serving the need. As the UX researcher, you're serving the needs of the designers and the developers. And it's best to view it that way. The one thing you don't want to do is get polarized and feel like you're telling them what to do feel like for, to have to have your rightful place in the process then better than they do. And you need to be telling them what to do.
And I think most people are relatively savvy about that, although maybe I'm just optimistic about human nature, but I feel like most people kind of get that. But the environment of the organization that they're in is competitive in that kind of way. The more you're gonna tend to slip, the more you're gonna feel the need to assert yourself in a assert. The fact that you have value and whatever. But I think the way you've assert that you have value is by supporting these other people and by making it clear that what you're there to do is to provide them with insights that make their work better.
But on the other hand, these are all people and [laugh] gonna be messy. So I don't know, I guess I don't feel looking to say, well, what should management be doing to define these roles so that it works? And I feel like that's not gonna work. It's defining the roles is gonna make some people feel like they've been curtailed and other people feel more entitled. And I feel like you need to create an atmosphere in which people understand that everybody's making contributions and that the UX researchers are not there to cut off the designers at the knees and whatever. But again, I don't have to do that. This is really easy. I'm just sitting in my basement
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Steve Krug:
I'm glad I don't have to have to handle any of that or manage any of that.
Brendan Jarvis:
So sitting in your basement, I'm about to pitch you the fourth and final rapid fire before we bring the show down to a close. So this is where your organization is early on in their UX journey, and you're trying to get the stakeholders, the important ones to see the value of usability testing. But it seems to be falling on deaf ears. What do you do?
Steve Krug:
Well, I already told you my favorite, which is trick them into coming do the competitive competitor testing and them into coming and seeing how well the process works at of no cost to them on topic of great interest to them. They're competitors. Just getting them in the room somehow. I feel like you're either people are gonna see the value in it and become converts, or they're not.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Some people, doesn't matter what they see, they still won't believe,
Steve Krug:
Right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Mm-hmm. Right. It's very hard to change people's minds if they don't want to be changed.
Steve Krug:
I think it's very hard to change people's minds about anything. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah.
Steve Krug:
I think people change their minds very rarely. Very rarely.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's why it's so important to find the allies that do believe and build your practice around that.
Steve Krug:
Yeah. There you go.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. So bringing the show down to a close, don't feel constrained by the realm of technology and this question, but what do you see as the greatest usability challenge that we are facing as a society?
Steve Krug:
Good question. The usability challenge. See, the problem is you think about a challenge. I come right back to I definitely shouldn't say this. I always say something against my own interest in any [laugh]
But I feel like social media has been nothing but bad. [laugh]. I feel like social media has, yes, there are upsides and benefits to social media and things that you can point to where it has in some ways improved people's lives. I feel like the net net is minus a thousand percent. I feel like it's caused more bad effect in society than almost anything in many years. And I mean, I'm biased because I live in the United States and we practically lost our country because of social media. [laugh], no question mean there couldn't have been a trouble without social media. Anything that improves that, I guess. So it doesn't answer your usability question in terms of usability. I mean, we have an example right here where distribution of vaccines obviously Trump had been saying for a long time that he had plans, that they had plans to distribute the vaccine.
They had no plans whatsoever. They had none. When the Biden people came in and they finally, and Biden people wouldn't let them talk to the, to the people who were responsible for it for months, it kept them separate and wouldn't let them share any information with Biden. When Biden people finally got their hands on it, they were like, not to my surprise. There was no plan. There was nothing. And so they basically had to come up with a hurry for supporting how does the stuff get distributed whether the guidelines for who gets it, and importantly, how do people book, how book them? And there was not a place. And so they had to very hurriedly, couple of commercial entities stepped in and said, well, we've got a system that'll work. And they weren't very good. And so it was a huge mess and it, it didn't scale well.
The things that were done didn't scale well at all. So there was that kind of and a lot of it was sort of usability problems. I mean, some of it was at the QA level, but I'm increasingly thinking QA problems are usability problems. If something's broken, then it's not usable. You really need to be aware of that. You really need to include that in usability. So it's been disturbing to me that caused people so much so havoc. You've had people who were in groups that were supposed to be able to get vaccinations at a given point in time, who qualified for it. They were 75 and older or whatever, [affirmative]. And they went online to try and sign up, and they ran into just horrible usability problems. So it just broken and they'd get disconnected. But there were basic things like you would go in and enter all this information about your, you'd go in, you'd find an appointment that was available, you'd enter all the information that you needed to register for it, and then you would click on submit and that slot was gone. And then you would have to reenter that information again about yourself each time. This is not rocket surgery, that those systems should have been storing that information.
And it made a horrible experience, which is compounded by the fact that a lot of people were trying to do it were over 75
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]
Steve Krug:
Or their relatives were trying to do it remotely for their relatives who are over 75. I guess that kind of thing. I'm not sure what the category is for that.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a meta level really, isn't it? It's something that affects everybody.
Steve Krug:
And yeah, it's also related to health events, massive public events, public needs that there, we should be better at that,
Brendan Jarvis:
But are yet for playing the quick game.
Steve Krug:
Okay, you're gonna ask me, me for my favorite curse word, that game?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, it doesn't involve words, and there may be curses just depending on what I ask you, [laugh]. This game's pretty simple. It's called, what's the first word that comes to mind? Oh yeah. It can be more than one word. It could be a sentence. It doesn't really matter. But just the first thing that comes to mind. So
Steve Krug:
I did one of these last weeks so I'm ready to go
Brendan Jarvis:
Use
Steve Krug:
The same, I'll use the same words in the same order regardless of what
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] cheating Steve
Steve Krug:
[laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
So I've got three words.
Steve Krug:
I don't think I get a passing grade, but okay. Yes,
Brendan Jarvis:
Go ahead. The first word is writing
Steve Krug:
Hard. Still hard
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative] second hard second words, road to nowhere.
Steve Krug:
Road to nowhere. David Burn, actually. And there's a story behind that, which is, there's a talking head song called Where on the Road to Nowhere. And it was actually the song that my wife and I used as the Recessional at our Wedding [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
I love it. It's such a great story.
Steve Krug:
Amusement of some relatives, but if you look up the song lyric, the lyric is actually perfect. We know where we're going. We don't know where we're going. We know where we've been, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so yes,
Brendan Jarvis:
I love it. That was your recess. Almost. Brilliant.
Steve Krug:
Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. And the last word is box fish.
Steve Krug:
Ah, beautiful. Beautiful. Box Fisher are just, they're, they're charming.
Brendan Jarvis:
They're put a link to an image of a box Fish in the show notes.
Steve Krug:
Yeah. Yeah. There are many endearing animals with box fisher. Just great.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking about your experiences in this field, Steve, if you could share one bit of wisdom with all of the people who are studying and working in UX today, what would you say to them?
Steve Krug:
I would say it's a, it's really interesting work. It remains really interesting work. Everybody I know who's been doing it forever, professionally, they never get bored with it. And compared to real work, it's pretty easy. [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Steve Krug:
So I guess I, I highly recommend it. It'll retain your interest.
Brendan Jarvis:
So true. Steve, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your knowledge and experiences with the UX community and for all of your contributions to it over the past 30 years.
Steve Krug:
Thanks. It's very nice. I appreciate it. I'm glad you asked. And maybe I'll see you in Auckland someday. [laugh]. I hope I don't have about 20 hour air trips anymore. I'm kinda,
Brendan Jarvis:
We'll just be you via Zoom.
Steve Krug:
Oh, there you go. Or right, or is it Musk? Who's doing the tunnel thing maybe?
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, I think it is. Yeah.
Steve Krug:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Look, you've played such an important role in shaping the way that hundreds of thousands of people think about UX and the importance of usability. So really huge thanks to you for persevering through the agony of writing and sharing your gifts with us and the world.
Steve Krug:
[laugh] thank you again. Very nice. I appreciate it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Steve, if people want to find out more about you and what you're up to, what is the best way for them to do that?
Steve Krug:
They can follow me on Twitter @skrug. although I don't tweet very much cuz I like people who don't treat very much [laugh] or they can check my website at either stevekrug.com or sensible.com.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks Steve. And so everyone who's tuned in, it's been great to have you here as well. Everything we've covered, including where to find Steve, plus any of the resources that we've mentioned, including a picture of a box fish will be posted in the show notes on YouTube. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in design, UX, and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe. And until next time, keep being brave.

Steve Krug

Why Our Work in UX Will Never Be Done

Subscribe

Who is Steve Krug?

Transcript