About me

Photo of Steve KrugSteve Krug (pronounced “kroog”) is best known as the author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, now in its third edition with over 600,000 copies in print.

Its younger sibling is the usability testing handbook Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.

The books were based on the 25+ years he spent as a usability consultant for a wide variety of clients like Apple, Bloomberg.com, Lexus.com, NPR, and the International Monetary Fund.

His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based in Chestnut Hill, MA.

Steve currently spends most of his time either a) writing, or b) watching old movies on tv (when he really should be writing)..

FAQ

What have you been up to lately?

Mostly working on some book projects. And one of them isn’t even about usability or UX: It’s about writing.

I’ve never made any secret about the fact that I find writing to be ridiculously hard work. In an attempt to spend less time in agony, over the years I’ve found some things that make writing easier (no, not alcohol), and produce better results—things I wish someone had told me back when I started out. And for a while now I’ve been trying to shape them into a book.

If you want to know more, check out my blog post about the writing book project, or the What have I been up to category, or my twitter feed (@skrug).

How did you end up doing what you do?

My “career” has definitely not been a straight line.

  • Set out to replace Don Herbert of the tv show Watch Mr. Wizard (think Bill Nye, only in the 1950s) when he retired.
  • Got an English Lit degree in college, after having to quit Physics because nobody explained calculus to me. (It’s a long story.)
  • Got a job as a proofreader from a friend who ran a typesetting shop. (After all, I did have a degree in English.)
  • Learned about computers while running the typesetting equipment.
  • Started writing computer manuals when a friend who was a tech writer had more work than she could do herself. (She literally said, “After all, you have a degree in English.”) Spent ten years as a tech writer.
  • Etc., etc.

For the rest of the story, check out this lovely chat I had with New Zealand UXer Brendan Jarvis on his podcast (The Space InBetween), where he walked me through my whole UX career.

Why did you write your bio in the third person?

Good question. Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time (way too much time) trying to decide which way to write it (“Steve Krug is…” or “I’m…”).

I suppose I settled on third person because a bio is inherently sort of “braggy” (“Steve was born in a log cabin, but grew up to be….”), so it sounds a little better if it seems like someone else is saying it.