User testing crucial for good Web design

IDG News Service recently had a chance to talk to site usability expert and consultant Steve Krug about best practices and major mistakes in Web design. Here is an edited transcript of the chat with Krug, who runs a one-man consulting firm called Advanced Common Sense in Boston, has a Web site called Sensible.com and wrote a book titled "Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability."

IDGNS: What are some major Web site usability best practices?

Krug: The main one is to make sure you've done some user testing. Bring people in and have them use the thing while you watch. That's the best practice. Do that throughout the design cycle. Start doing it early. Don't wait until you have a finished new design.

As a designer you know too much about the site. You have to bring in people who don't know anything about the site and have them try and use it. That's my single best practice.

IDGNS: How is user-generated content affecting design and usability decisions? What's the right way to incorporate those features into your design?

Krug: It has become one of those things which everyone now feels compelled [to include on their sites]. You can imagine the conversations in boardrooms with bosses saying: "We've got to have social networking on our site." Because it's worked well for some people, there's a rush for everyone to incorporate it, and that's usually not a good thing. You don't want to have an attitude of "we've got to have it whether or not it makes sense for our organization."

I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt. The usability and design issues aren't nearly as important as the issues of whether it's appropriate for the organization and whether you're going to be willing to put the resources into it to manage it. It takes an awful lot of work.

IDGNS: Video has become very popular in the past year. How does it affect design decisions?

Krug: For years, very often the reaction you'd get whenever people would open up a page that had video, was: "Oh, it's interesting but I wouldn't use it because that stuff never works for me." The general reactions were that the video was either not going to load, or be painfully slow to load or would require a plug-in users didn't have. YouTube changed that, because it just works. It plays the video right away, it's not jerky or start-and-stop, and that turned people around. It's not that people suddenly realized they wanted to spend time watching short videos. It was like Amazon, which succeeded because it worked, and Google as well. So if you're going to implement video, do it as well as YouTube does it or don't do it at all.

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