Pulldown menus...my worst nightmare...

One common approach is using pulldown menus...You have to seek them out...They're hard to scan...They're twitchy.

-Krug, Don't Make Me Think!

I found the extrememly long chapter 8 very useful. I did my Usability testing before I read this section, which probably was a stupid mistake, but in a way, I'm glad I did. During my usability testing, one of my test subjects hardly even noticed the pulldown menus that materialized on Cobragolf.com. Because he didn't notice those pulldown menus, he wasted valuable time and almost missed the information he was looking for (because they did save space, but didn't offer the same information on another page...go figure). As soon as I read this section, I thought back to that incident. I never really noticed how uneffective they really are, especially when involved with my usability testing.

Yet again, Krug's book is proving useful to me. Before reading this book, I never put a lot of thought into how much time I spent looking around on a site for what I was looking for. Now, I'm a bit more conscious about what's going on. Even the comment about the taglines. They really do make a difference. When I think about Staples' website, since I work there, I always think about their tagline "That was easy." I can't tell you how many people ask me if we sell the easy button...so it only fits that they feature the easy button on the website as well. Still, Staples could use some of Krug's advice. They recently rennovated their website, and I don't think it was for the better. But that's not what this blog is about...

Even though Krug did get a little bit repetative towards the middle of chapter 8 and offered almost too many examples of bad websites, he did an excellent job of getting the message across that it's important to send the right message. Get my drift?