Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Stefan Sagmeister speak at the Salazar Awards. He was totally inspirational, but really – what was I expecting? The guy is throughly entertaining and he managed to make all of us polite Canadians squirm and laugh at the same time with his stories of jelly fish exhibits gone awry, leaving his intern to be interrogated by the FBI and simply shouting "shut the f#%k up!" to a noisy bunch on the other side of the room.

He went through his book "Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far" telling us of his process. The book is beautiful, inside and out:

The book design reminds me of Chip Kidd’s follow up book to The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners:

Both designers use type that is hand drawn or drawn from the materials around them. The type becomes the image.

Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear, Saul Ferris’s book jacket for "Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan"

Also in common is their great one liners:

Chip Kidd: "Good is Dead" "Do you see?"

Stefan Sagmeister: "Trying to look good limits my life."

Check out Chip Kidd’s website "Good is Dead" and Stefan Sagmeister website for "Things I’ve learned in life so far".

How do your clients view your website, do they find the information they are looking for? Do they become frustrated and just leave?

I went on-line today to view the status of my 2006 taxes and was instantly irritated by the poor usability on the CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency) site. I was told how easy it was by the CRA agent I spoke to when I filed my taxes, but I discovered fairly quickly that if I didn’t read everything on the page I wasn’t going anywhere in the site. Since I didn’t have time for that I quickly left the site and called an agent. Sometimes companies haven’t budgeted for usability testing and rely on our feedback to improve their sites. This is exactly what the CRA site does, so unless people like me let them know what I had problems with they will never know.

Going through this process this morning reminded me of a great book on Website Usability, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make me Think. This is a quick, easy read and can help you improve the usability of your site so you don’t lose clients or customers. This book isn’t just for developers and designers, it is for anyone who has a website or is thinking of building a website. Steve Kung uses humour to open your mind on how great usability can be achieved and he does it without overwhelming you with a bunch of technical terms you’ve never heard of.

Why is usability important?

Usability is about user experience, if someone doesn’t have a good user experience with your site, it is likely they won’t come back.

Good Usability = positive user experience + customer satisfaction + positive PR

You can also look at it this way:

Good Usability = Improved ROI and is really just good practice.

Still need convincing?

Usability Expert Jakob Nielsen puts it bluntly, “On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a web site is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave.

If users get lost on a web site, they leave. If a web site’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?

There’s no such thing as a user reading a web site manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface.

There are plenty of other web sites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.”

You can check out Steve Krug’s book at http://www.sensible.com.