“More important than knowing all about the people we design for, we should have a deep understanding of the specific activity we’re supporting with our design… The most important question we can ask is not ‘who is using your software?’ but ‘what are people using your software doing?’.” – Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter
Purchase Designing for the Social Web for more insights from Joshua Porter.
“The process of design starts with exploration, but ends with refinement. The best designers carefully move from one to the other, making sure they spend enough time exploring before locking themselves into a design approach.” – Jared Spool
Read more in Jared’s article “Exploring Options and Making Decisions.”
“Design is learning by making.” – Joey Hasty
Joey is an Interactive Creative Director at Disney. This quote is from Joey’s talk about Disney’s creative approach at Geekend 2009.
Thanks to @daveIxD for tweeting this quote.
“It isn’t sufficient to simply eliminate user error—designing user delight is the goal.” – IBM Design
This quote is from IBM Design’s Twitter feed.
“Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.” – Gentry Underwood
Read more in Gentry’s article “Social Software: The other ‘Design for Social Impact’.”
“As the old saying goes, in the expert’s mind there are few possibilities, but for one with the beginner’s mind, the world is wide open. Designers understand the need to take risks, especially during early explorations of the problem. They are not afraid to break with convention. Good designers are open minded and comfortable with ambiguity early on in the process, this is how discoveries are made.” – Garr Reynolds
This quote is from Garr’s article “10 tips on how to think like a designer.”
Catriona Cornett