“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.

“While each discipline on the product team has its role to play, it is the true teamwork and collaboration of a cohesive product team that makes great user experiences possible.” -Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Read Pabini’s article “Sharing Ownership of UX” on UXmatters for her thoughts on how the entire product team must work together when making product decisions.

“There are no simple ‘right’ answers for most web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.” - Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Be sure to pick up Steve’s book Don’t Make Me Think if you haven’t already.  It is a great overview of basic usability topics.

“Information architecture is not about surface glamor; it’s about mission-critical infrastructure.  And infrastructure has widespread and long-term impact. The ripples of our designs spread outwards, affecting the work of interface designers, programmers, authors, and eventually users… As we design the legacy information architectures of tomorrow, we should consider our responsibility to the big here and the long now.” - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville

Purchase Information Architecutre for the World Wide Web for a great overview of Information Architecture.

“The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn’t mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable.” - Don Norman

Read Don’s article “Simplicity Is Not The Answer” for his thoughts on why simplicity should not necessarily be the primary goal when creating products and services.

“Experience design should not be solely brand focused; instead it should not be too branded focused. It is about designing delivery of customer needs, so naturally it should start with the customers. It should form the core of a go-to-market strategy of any brand. It is the experience first, then the messages.” - Idris Mootee

Read Idris’ article “Experience Design Is The Active Pursuit Of Customer-Inspired Products/Services, Not Just Company-Defined Products/Services” here.

“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.” - Alan Cooper

Purchase Alan Cooper’s book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity here.

“Design is the term we use to describe both the process and the result of giving tangible form to human ideas. Design doesn’t just contribute to the quality of life; design, in many ways, now constitutes the quality of life.” - Peter Lawrence

Peter is the Founder of the Corporate Design Foundation, a non-profit education and research organization whose mission is to improve the quality of life and the effectiveness of organizations through design.

“Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information.” - Edward R. Tufte

Quote retrieved from PageThinker’s collection of design quotes.  Check out Edward Tufte’s books for some great thoughts on how to visualize and display information.

Site Update: I’m pleased to announce that you can now access inspireUX within the great wireframing/prototyping product, Balsamiq Mockups.  You can access inspireUX via the “Help” menu for when you need some inspiration while using the program.

Please take a moment and look at Balsamiq Mockups.  It’s an interesting way of creating mockups that look like hand-drawn sketches with over 60 pre-built UI elements.  View Balsamiq Mockups’ blog post about the update here.