‘Don’t Make Me Think’ Author Steve Krug Says Social Media Is Terrible

I think social media is the worst thing that’s happened in the last forty years,” Steve Krug tells me.

A quarter century ago, Krug wrote “Don’t Make Me Think,” one of the founding books of internet usability. It’s the reason sites have big bolded text and read vertically, not zagging around the screen. It’s why links look like links and buttons look like buttons. He gave instructions like “instructions must die.” In other words: websites and apps should just work, intuitively, effortlessly. The book is still taught in several university courses and regularly cited on X by Silicon Valley apostles like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

These days, we have a new word for the tao of Krug: frictionless.

Krug wrote his book in the freewheeling early days of the World Wide Web. It was four years before Mark Zuckerberg brewed up TheFacebook in his Harvard dorm. The current internet, so smooth that users slip and slide and stay online for hours and never look up, was inconceivable.

Now 77, Krug has old-fashioned tastes. He likes to read on the page, printing out the articles I send him. He spends his nights watching Turner Classic Movies. He sends me a clip from CSPAN, television’s most technologically retrograde channel.

Still, Krug fumbles around Facebook, mostly to see his wife’s posts and to watch his friend’s drone videos. He occasionally gets sucked into woodworking videos. “All of a sudden, it’s an hour later, and I’ve just been watching these dumb Reels that provide no real benefit to me,” he says.

These are the days of screentime panics, of rising loneliness and plummeting literacy. There’s a new movement of people hoping to cure this affliction. These are the dumbphone users, the people buying up landlines and lockout apps to keep them offline. You might even call them the friction-maxxers.

“I think it’s pretty admirable,” Krug says. “What they’re saying is: ‘This stuff is not improving our lives.'” The guy who said “Don’t Make Me Think” is applauding tech users begging to think more. Indeed, the New York Times took a jab at Krug’s title this month, calling it “worrisome.”

Still, Krug doesn’t think his philosophy is to blame for the evils of social media. Just the opposite. It’s not frictionlessness that’s ruined the internet, it’s bad actors who have made bad products additively friction-free.

Krug didn’t aim to become the king of usability.

After graduating with a degree in English from Boston College in 1971, he became a proofreader as typesetting transitioned from lead to digital. Then he spent a decade writing tech manuals. Then, a friend’s boss hired him to perform usability testing for enterprise software.

The book was a happy accident. Famed designer Roger Black was planning a series of volumes about the internet, enlisting Krug to write the installment about making the burgeoning internet easier to use for everyday Americans. Black’s credibility alone got Krug a $40,000 advance — about $80,000 today — a number unheard of for a technical book by an unpublished author. None of the series’s other books ever made it to print.

Then, Krug “spent a very miserable year” preparing the manuscript. It was a slow-burn hit, lodging its way into the bookshelves of web designers across the country. You can see Krug’s influence in the ease of “Add to Cart,” in the obviousness of Wikipedia’s subsections. When you see a nice big site logo reminding you where you are, thank Krug.

“Don’t Make Me Think” has sold over 700,000 copies in 15 languages. I talked to several Krugites. Walker Williams, chief product officer of the e-commerce platform Fourth Wall, says he gifts the book to all of his company’s designers. Nick Baudoin, founder of the web development firm Alkali, tells me that he first read it in college, and reread it again recently when he stumbled across it on Amazon. Hiten Shah, CEO of web analytics company Crazy Egg, first read the book around 2003. He still keeps it on the shelf, along with one of its revised editions. Occasionally, he’ll take it down and flip through it to remind himself that good design is a sign of respect.

Krug isn’t sure the internet has gotten more usable since he wrote the book in 2000. While many sites are smoothed down and simplified, easy access to the actual things we need — like contacting customer service, submitting online forms, or canceling a subscription — remains far out of reach. “It’s gotten worse, and I think it will get even worse with AI,” he says.

For him, there are two definitions of the “frictionless” web.

The first takes something we need to do — pay our bills, do our jobs — and makes it easier. That’s usability, Krug’s modus operandi. The second definition hews closer to profit-maximizing. Companies engineer their products to be so easy that users are endlessly engaged. “Every time it shakes the little laser pointer in front of the kitten, it makes five cents,” he says.

This separation absolves Krug from any complicity with modern social media. I ask Krug what he’d think of a Meta engineer who believed they were practicing the principles of “Don’t Make Me Think” to design Instagram’s infinite scroll. Would they be misinterpreting him?

Krug gives me an emphatic yes. He makes it clear in the book: if you’re a UX designer, then being a “user advocate” is your primary job. (Meta engineers, then, are not “user advocates” because they leave doom-scrollers worse off.) “I feel like the book has its own moral tone, and that it attracts people who are more ethical,” he says.

He lays out his ideal version of social media. Users wouldn’t be able to have more than 100 followers, which would tamp down on virality. Short-form videos would also be more difficult to find — only available via search and subscriptions, not through a curated algorithm — and wouldn’t be “spoon-fed to you in such large doses,” he says. That’s a level of friction that he’d enjoy.

“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.”

He’s especially worried about kids. When he was young, there were only three TV stations. Still, his parents didn’t let him sit in front of the television every day after school, so he went to run around with the neighborhood kids instead. It benefited him, he says.

“They’re designed for addiction, because that’s how they make money,” Krug says of the social platforms.

So, has Krug changed his mind about that whole not thinking thing? No, he tells me. He’s only ever changed his mind about one thing: that UX would always be side-lined. Then came Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, who Krug called the “ROI case study.” The duo pushed Apple to worship at the altar of usability.

“I don’t mind changing my mind,” he says. “It just hasn’t happened very much around this.”

After the book’s smash success, Krug opened a solo consultancy and published several new editions. These days, he spends much of his time at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, spending time with his wife and watching procedurals like “Law and Order.” He jokes that his days are filled with canceling subscriptions and Googling symptoms.

He still struggles to get his thoughts on the page. He’s been working on the latest edition of “Don’t Make Me Think,” for five years, and has set his own deadline: “Hopefully, while I have enough brain cells left to finish it.”

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about consumer AI and tech culture.