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

A quarter of a century ago, Krug wrote “Don’t Make Me Think,” one of the founding books on Internet usability. It’s why sites have large bold text and are read vertically, without moving across the screen. That’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 work intuitively and effortlessly. The book is still taught in several university courses and is regularly cited on X by Silicon Valley apostles, such as Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator.

Today we have a new word for the Tao of Krug: frictionless.

Krug wrote his book in the early days of the World Wide Web. Four years passed before Mark Zuckerberg created TheFacebook in his Harvard dorm room. Today’s Internet, so fluid that users swipe and swipe and stay online for hours without ever looking up, was inconceivable.

Krug, now 77, has old-fashioned tastes. He likes to read on the page, print the articles I send him. Spend your evenings watching classic Turner movies. He sends me a clip from CSPAN, the most technologically retrograde television channel.

Still, Krug fumbles through Facebook, mostly to check out his wife’s posts and his friends’ drone videos. From time to time he gets caught up in woodworking videos. “Suddenly, an hour has passed and I’ve been watching these silly Reels that provide me with no real benefit,” he says.

These are days of screen panic, growing loneliness and falling literacy. There is a new movement of people hoping to cure this disease. These are the dumb phone users, the people who buy landlines and lock apps to keep them offline. You could even call them the rubs.

“I think it’s quite admirable,” Krug says. “What they’re saying is, ‘This doesn’t make our lives better.'” The guy who said “Don’t make me think” applauds technology users who beg to think more. In fact, the New York Times criticized Krug’s title this month, calling it “troubling.”

Still, Krug doesn’t believe his philosophy is to blame for social media’s ills. Quite the opposite. It’s not a lack of friction that has ruined the Internet, it’s bad actors that have created bad additively friction-free products.

Krug did not intend to become the king of usability.

After graduating with a degree in English from Boston College in 1971, he became a proofreader as typesetting moved from digitized to digital. He then spent a decade writing technical manuals. Then a friend’s boss hired him to do usability testing for enterprise software.

The book was a happy accident. Famed designer Roger Black was planning a series of volumes on the Internet and hired Krug to write the installment on how to make the burgeoning Internet easier to use for ordinary Americans. Black’s credibility alone earned Krug an advance of $40,000 (about $80,000 today), an unheard-of figure for a technical book written by an unpublished author. None of the other books in the series were ever printed.

Krug then “spent a very miserable year” preparing the manuscript. It was a slow-moving success that made its way onto the shelves of web designers across the country. You can see Krug’s influence in the ease of “Add to Cart”, in the obviousness of Wikipedia subsections. When you see a nice big site logo that reminds you where you are, thank Krug.

“Don’t Make Me Think” has sold more than 700,000 copies in 15 languages. I spoke with several Krugites. Walker Williams, chief product officer at e-commerce platform Fourth Wall, says he gives the book to all the designers at his company. Nick Baudoin, founder of web development company Alkali, tells me he first read it in college and recently reread it when he found it on Amazon. Hiten Shah, CEO of web analytics company Crazy Egg, first read the book around 2003. He still keeps it on his shelves, along with one of his revised editions. From time to time, he takes it down and flips through it to remember that good design is a sign of respect.

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

For him, there are two definitions of a “frictionless” network.

The first requires something we have to do (pay our bills, do our work) and makes it easier. That’s usability, Krug’s modus operandi. The second definition is closer to profit maximization. Companies design their products to be so It is easy for users to participate infinitely. “Every time you move the little laser pointer in front of the kitten, you earn five cents,” he says.

This separation absolves Krug of any complicity with modern social media. I ask Krug what he would think of a Meta engineer who believed he was practicing “Don’t make me think” principles to design Instagram’s infinite scroll. Would they be misunderstanding it?

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

It presents its ideal version of social networks. Users could not have more than 100 followers, which would reduce virality. Short-form videos would also be harder to find (they’ll only be available through searches and subscriptions, not through a curated algorithm) and wouldn’t be “spoon-fed in such large doses,” he says. That’s a level of friction he would enjoy.

“There could have been a very good life for social media that could have been a benefit to society,” Krug says. “It hasn’t gone in that direction at all.”

He is especially concerned about the children. When I was young, there were only three television channels. Still, his parents didn’t allow him to sit in front of the TV every day after school, so he went running with the neighborhood kids. It benefited him, he says.

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

So has Krug changed his mind about that whole not-thinking thing? No, he tells me. He has only changed his mind about one thing: that UX would always be left aside. Then came Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, whom Krug called the “return on investment case study.” The duo pushed Apple to worship at the altar of usability.

“I don’t mind changing my mind,” he says. “There just hasn’t been much going on around this.”

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

He still has a hard time putting 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, as long as I have enough brain cells left to finish it.”

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