Steve Krug internet usability’s founding father has a blunt verdict on what the web has become: social media is the worst thing to happen in four decades, and artificial intelligence is about to make it worse.
Krug, now 77 and living in Brookline, Massachusetts, wrote Don’t Make Me Think in 2000, one of the foundational texts of web design. The book is the reason links look like links, why buttons look like buttons, and why text is large, bold, and reads vertically rather than zigging across the screen. Its central instruction: websites and apps should work intuitively, without demanding effort from the user.
More than two decades on, Krug is watching that philosophy be claimed, and he believes distorted, by the very platforms he finds most troubling.
Steve Krug’s Internet Usability Philosophy, and How Silicon Valley Twisted It
For Krug, there are two kinds of frictionless design. The first removes genuine obstacles: it helps users pay bills, complete forms, do their jobs. That is what Don’t Make Me Think was about. The second is something else entirely: engineering a product so absorbing that users stay engaged indefinitely, generating revenue with every scroll.
‘Every time it shakes the little laser pointer in front of the kitten, it makes five cents,’ he says.
He is clear that Meta engineers who claim his principles as justification for Instagram’s infinite scroll are misreading him. A UX designer’s primary job, as he states in the book, is to be a ‘user advocate.’ Doom-scrollers, by his reckoning, are left worse off, not better served. ‘I feel like the book has its own moral tone, and that it attracts people who are more ethical,’ he says.
Krug’s ideal social network would look quite different from anything that exists today. Users would be capped at 100 followers to suppress virality. Short-form videos would be available only via search and direct subscriptions, not pushed by a recommendation algorithm. That level of designed friction, he says, is friction he would welcome.
‘There could have been a really good life for social networking that could have been a benefit to society,’ Krug says. ‘It hasn’t gone in that direction at all.’
From Proofreader to a Book That Sold 700,000 Copies
Krug (pronounced ‘kroog,’ per his own website) did not set out to become the authority on web usability. After graduating from Boston College with a degree in English in 1971, he worked as a proofreader, then spent a decade writing technical manuals before moving into usability testing for enterprise software.
The book came about through designer Roger Black, who was planning a series of internet guides and enlisted Krug to write the instalment on usability. Black’s reputation alone secured Krug a $40,000 advance, roughly $80,000 in today’s terms, an unheard-of sum for a technical book by an unpublished author. None of the other planned volumes in the series ever reached print.
It was a slow-burn success. Don’t Make Me Think has now sold over 700,000 copies in 15 languages. A third edition, subtitled ‘A Common Sense Approach to Web (and Mobile) Usability,’ was published by New Riders in 2014 and runs 212 pages.
Krug’s influence spread well beyond bookshelves. His consultancy, Advanced Common Sense, which he describes as ‘just me and a few well-placed mirrors,’ has worked with clients including Apple, Bloomberg, Lexus, NPR, and the International Monetary Fund across a career of more than 25 years. He also wrote a second book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, a practical handbook on usability testing. Y Combinator chief executive Garry Tan is among the Silicon Valley figures who still cite the original book on Y Combinator‘s intellectual lineage.
The book’s apostles span industries. Walker Williams, chief product officer at e-commerce platform Fourth Wall, gives it to every designer he hires. Hiten Shah, chief executive of web analytics company Crazy Egg, first read it around 2003 and keeps it on the shelf to remind himself that good design is a form of respect.
Despite that legacy, Krug is not convinced the web has actually become more usable. The surfaces may be smoother, but the tasks that matter most, cancelling a subscription, reaching customer service, submitting a government form, remain needlessly hard. ‘It’s gotten worse, and I think it will get even worse with AI,’ he says.
He has spent five years working on a new edition of Don’t Make Me Think and has set himself a deadline with characteristic wryness: ‘Hopefully, while I have enough brain cells left to finish it.’ Whether that edition lands before AI reshapes the web once more is the question his career has been building towards.