Don't Make Me Think, rev 4

When Steve Krug wrote the third edition of his best-selling book about usability in 2013, he thought he was finally through with writing. And he really liked that idea.

More than half a million people had read Don’t Make Me Think, often described as “required reading,” “the bible of usability,” or “everyone’s introduction to UX design.” Readers seemed to love that it was short, witty, profusely illustrated, and full of practical commonsensical insights about how people actually use all the digital “stuff” we create.

But given all the changes between then and now (usability had became, as he puts  it, “a wholly owned subsidiary of User Experience Design,” a million new UXers were minted during the UX hiring gold rush, and AI suddenly appeared, promising to either make all of them incredibly productive, put them all out of work, or wipe them out with the rest of mankind), against his better judgment he couldn’t resist giving it one more shot.

It’s still short enough to read on a plane ride (as many people actually have), still a fun read (“for a technical book”), and it’s still a uniquely useful guide to understanding how to design for people. This new edition retains and updates Steve’s core principles, and adds entirely new chapters like

• Quant vs. Qual which explains how combining UX data and observation makes for better decisions.

• UX, say hello to AI is a thorough treatment of the elephant in the room: What AI is and isn’t, how it’s likely to progress, and how it will affect the people who design products and the people who use them.

• Doing the right thing (subtitle: How to keep your UX job and do good work without selling your soul) talks about things like ethics, maintaining the role of user advocate, and career survival in the modern UX world.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a newcomer, designer, researcher, developer, product manager, stakeholder, CEO, or just someone vibe coding in your spare time, this book will help you produce—and your users enjoy—better products.