“All web apps are trying to suck. They are trying to be bloated. They are trying to be unstructured. They are trying to be confusing. You are the stopgap. You are the one who stands between order and chaos. You are the sniper who must pick off every distraction, unneeded feature, and extra word that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. You must be a killer. You must say no. You must anger those who disagree with you. That is the only way to make something great.” - Matt Linderman

Read Matt’s article “Ira Glass, entropy, and software development” on the 37signals blog “Signal vs. Noise”

“An experience designer must love and care about people and the world in which we all live. It’s his mission in the world to proudly spread love and happiness through his creations.” - Andrë Braz

Read Andrë’s “Experience Design Manifesto” here

“We don’t want to figure out what all those buttons do or why they are set up the way they are. We just want to get on with our lives and do our jobs well. When we make use of technology, we want to focus on achieving our goals, not on deciphering the technology. The design should be in the background of our attention.” - The Human Factor by Kim Vicente

Read The Human Factor for Kim’s take on “Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology.”

“By going deep into our customers’ lives and closely observing their behaviors, you can wow them when you address needs that they’d never be able to articulate. By immersing yourself in the customer’s wider world of emotion and culture, you can wow them by attuning the offering to practical needs and dimensions of delight that normally go unfulfilled.” - Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens

Be sure to pick up Subject to Change by four members of Adaptive Path.  This book describes how businesses can use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process.

“Usability and technical performance only get you on the playing field. What gives you the winning edge is persuasive, useful content….Let’s get serious about content, for it’s key to helping customers and differentiating our companies, our products, ourselves.” - Colleen Jones

Read Colleen’s article “Content Is More Than Copy” for her explanation of the importance of focusing on content in your designs.

“Provide an experience that is both useful, usable, desirable, and differentiated and you will create demand for your brand and delight your customers.” - David Armano

Read David’s article “Creating Compassionate Designers” here.

“I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.” - William McDonough

Watch architect and designer William McDonough’s TED Talk “The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle” for his thoughts on designing for the complete product lifecycle.

“In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes, interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies – computers, telecommunications, mobile phones, and so on. If I were to sum up interaction design in a sentence, I would say that it’s about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts – for work, for play, and for entertainment.” - Gillian Crampton Smith

Gillian wrote the foreward to Bill Moggridge’s book Designing Interactions. Watch a video interview with Gillian in which she discusses the ways in which people adopt technologies and the growing sophistication in the qualities of interaction design.

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“As web designers, we need to be very careful about the lure of complexity. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that if it’s hard to design, it must be good; that if it’s using the latest technology, it must be good; that if all our friends think it’s really cool, it must be good.” - Gerry McGovern

Read Gerry’s article “Achieving greater simplicity involves managing increasing complexity” for his thoughts on the importance of reducing complexity. Gerry McGovern provides website content management solutions.

“For a human being the product is not an end in itself but the gateway to a plethora of experiences.” - Nokia Design Manifesto

Browse through the first edition of Nokia’s Design Manifesto (pdf) for many inspiring thoughts about design.