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\"If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense – the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product\'s components.\" - Don Norman
“It’s becoming increasingly hard to do large-scale digital product design without integrating an understanding of data… Data analytics can help create and optimize opportunities. Designers versed in data may uncover trends or insights that not only yield better products but new product or business ideas as well.” – Luke Wroblewski
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“Products that are well designed have value beyond necessity: The defining feature of a great product isn’t its power, its size, its speed, or its novelty. We value things according to the quality of the experience we have when we use them… A great product doesn’t just do its job; it does something more.” – Harold Hambrose
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“Many of the most compelling usability test insights come not from the elements that are evaluated, but rather those not evaluated… The unintended conclusions—the peripheral insights—are often what feed a designer’s instincts most.” – Robert Hoekman Jr.
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“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
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“If we continue to treat content as an extra to information architecture, to content management or to anything else, we miss a bright opportunity to influence users. Content is not a nice-to-have extra. Content is a star of the user experience show. Let’s make content shine.” – Colleen Jones
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“Whatever your team might call it—usability testing, design testing, getting feedback—the most effective input for informed design decisions is data about the behavior and performance of people using a design to reach their own goals.” – Dana Chisnell
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“I think that we, as designers, have to be completely open to the changes that technology is making in our discipline… as designers we need to be first in line to try the new technologies so that we can use the new technologies more to our advantage than to our detriment.” – Debbie Millman
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“A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When they are in synthesis. In other words, when they fuse. When form predominates, meaning is blunted… When content predominates, interest lags.” – Paul Rand
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“‘Because it sucks’ is not a reason to redesign. ‘It sucks’ leaves the scope wide open with no measure of success. It’s a sure way to scrap the good decisions you made along with the mistakes. Instead, start the redesign with a question: ‘What is right about this design?’ Use that perspective to identify specific problems and then target those exact problems.” – Ryan Singer
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“Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.” – Alan Cooper
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“Creating visual imagery is a state of mind. It involves the reproduction of what we see. But much more than that, it becomes an outlet to express feelings about what we experience.” – Tracy Sabin
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“We don’t spend enough time up front on projects discussing, assessing, defining and refining the value of what we make. We jump too quickly into design and build before applying rigor to what we make. It’s easy to get lost in the product detail: a screen, code and forget what the product’s value is and who you are building it for. Everything we do should be to help move the product a little closer to success.” – Daniel Szuc
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“How do we professionally manage content? We don’t. We shouldn’t manage content in the same way that we shouldn’t manage technology. Content and technology are merely a means to an end. What is the end? The end is the task the customer wishes to complete. That is what we should manage.” – Gerry McGovern
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“What’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords.” – John Maeda
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“Why shouldn’t our functional objects–our everyday kitchen gadgets and social websites–also be beautiful and delightful in playful, unexpected, inventive and illuminating ways?” – Matt Webb
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“Coming up with an idea is really just the beginning. It’s the crafting of the idea into a real, working thing that is a truly exciting experience. Making an idea come alive, into something that makes sense, is then made and put into the market, and then connects with people in a meaningful way—that’s the hard part.” – Ted Booth
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“Good design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product.” – Dieter Rams
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“Talking about design is an inherently fuzzy process… What designers do is take abstract things and make them more tangible.” – Todd Wilkens
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“Designers are optimistic people who are trained to be courageous about the future—and making the future happen. They aren’t always aware of the intricacies of operations and the impacts of the solutions they propose, just like entrepreneurs, but they aren’t afraid of confronting a blank piece of paper (or screen or board) and getting to work making something new.” – Nathan Shedroff
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“Users will pay a premium for a better, higher quality product that does a better job serving their needs, for instance… A beautiful, easy to use object can often command a higher price, even if the manufacturing cost is the same.” – Dan Saffer
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“Accept—quietly and implicitly—that your work will affect millions. Focus on the nuances and details of the craft itself, and on your capacity to engage in a conversation with your work. Through this will come humble and beautiful design solutions that will live on, affect culture, and change behavior. And through this will come a sense of subdued pleasure in your creative work.” – Jon Kolko
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“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service – from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That’s systems thinking.” – Don Norman
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“Designers are gifted with a certain perspective of the world that can cause much frustration and wonderment. The average person doesn’t have the filters in place to see when they have been ignored by the product they are using. Occasionally, people can tell when something wasn’t designed, but they normally deal with the damages done physically, mentally, and socially. In an attempt to stop the pain, designers create interactions that look to discourage undesirable behavior and promote desirable behavior.” – Brad Nunnally
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“Understanding is important, but it’s only the beginning. It’s got to lead to a change in behavior. The question interaction designers need to ask ourselves, then, is this: how can our work help people to not only understand the change needed, but also to begin making it?” – Tom Igoe
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“A designer…has the true responsibility to give his audiences not what they think they want, for this is almost invariably the usual, the accustomed, the obvious, and hence, the unspontaneous. Rather, he should provide that quality of thought and intuition which rejects the ineffectual commonplace for effectual originality.” – Lester Beall
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Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful.” – Matthew E. May
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“There will always be a need for dialogue, and if we are to have a meaningful conversation with our users, we have to facilitate the conversation with an interface that welcomes them with open arms… By asking users to engage on a personal level, we are creating a relationship based on shared ownership of knowledge and value. And best of all, it doesn’t feel like work. Actions really do speak louder than words.” – Zeus Jones
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“Designers spend much of their time thinking through problems from the ‘outside in.’ Contrasted with the ‘inside out’ approaches that typify corporate business agendas, this methodology focuses on the perspective of customers and end users when analyzing and crafting solutions. Applying this perspective to strategic work creates more genuine relevance.” – Luke Wroblewski
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“The more we listen to and try to understand what are clients/users are looking for, we can refine our products, and processes in an effort to keep them engaged, and appeal to potential users and clients. With our users in mind and the right vision we can plan, and develop successful applications that don’t fade, because they are based on user needs, not trends.” – Aaron Irizarry
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“If I could tell you one thing about getting involved in design, it would be to have passion. Have undying, unending passion for what it is you’re doing. You’ll run up against people who don’t understand it, who don’t want to pay for it, who don’t respect it. Ultimately, none of that matters if you have the passion to make it happen.” – Jon Kolko
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“Good designers happen to have talents or skills that allow them to make their point of view tangible, but that\'s not enough. Designers should be engaged due to their ability to create and support a strong point of view first, followed quickly by their ability to produce the goods.” - Brett Lovelady
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“The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for (whether intentional or not).” – Joshua Porter
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“Design is about choices and intentions, it is not accidental. Design is about process. The end user will usually not notice ‘the design of it.’ It may seem like it just works, assuming they think about it at all, but this ease-of-use (or ease-of-understanding) is not by accident, it’s a result of your careful choices and decisions.” – Garr Reynolds
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“Good designers are skilled at noticing and observing. They are able to see both the big picture and the details of the world around them. Humans are natural pattern seekers; be mindful of this skill in yourself and in others. Design is a ‘whole brain’ process. You are creative, practical, rational, analytic, empathetic, and passionate. Foster these aptitudes.” – Garr Reynolds
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“[UX designers] need creativity and vision to [create] a system that helps a business achieve its goals by making it easy and enjoyable for its users and customers to achieve theirs. You need the ability to both envision the big picture and craft the details. You need the creativity to innovate consciously and the drive to encourage innovation in others.” – Fred Beecher
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“While I acknowledge that there is a need for art, fun, and a general good time on the web, I believe that the main goal of most web projects should be to make it easy for customers to perform useful tasks.” – Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
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“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” – Design House Stockholm
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“Differentiate yourself by fully understanding the problem before you attempt to solve it… Don’t just fall in love with a solution and go full-force on making it look great, but really make sure that whatever you design is fitting a need in the world and has a purpose.” – Whitney Hess
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“Understanding that all design happens within a context is the first (and arguably the only) stop to make on your way to becoming a good designer. You can be a bad designer after that, of course, but you don’t stand a chance of being a good one if you don’t first consider context. It’s everything: In graphics, communication, interaction, architecture, product, service, you name it—if it doesn\'t take context into account, it’s crap.” - Allan Chochinov
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“UX is about technology that fulfils more than just instrumental needs in a way that acknowledges its use as a subjective, situated, complex and dynamic encounter. UX is a consequence of a user’s internal state, the characteristics of the designed system and the context within which the interaction occurs.” - Marc Hassenzahl and Noam Tractinsky
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“What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful… Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind… The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.” – Michelle Obama
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“Great design is storytelling at its finest; it is insightful, sincere and evokes emotion and change. Design is at the center of the user experience and it is the designer’s responsibility to make the experience remarkable for both the client and their audience.” - Jim Antonopoulos
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“Doing a great job, playing a significant role in your company’s success, and providing ongoing value is about delivering great user experiences. It’s about how your work can add real value for both the business and the people who use your products… It’s about how you can keep design in focus.” – Daniel Szuc
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“As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful. We need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design.” – Joshua Porter
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“Be someone else. It takes great empathy to create a good experience. To create relevant experiences, you have to forget everything you know and design for others. Align with the expected patience, level of interest, and depth of knowledge of your users. Talk in the users’ language.” - Niko Nyman
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“The people in business must understand what they can achieve with designers. Designers have to understand that they really must deliver to business not just beautification, or another form of it, but substantial change.” - Hartmut Esslinger
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“Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. They’re able to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and society and convert those changes into objects and ideas that people can understand.” – Paola Antonelli
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“User Experience Design is not data-driven, it’s insight-driven. Data is just raw material for insight... We have to be able to do both: use data to inform the fullest possible understanding of the behavior and context of potential users, as well as bring our own experience and talent to the challenge.” - Andrew Hinton
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“How can companies better connect to its customers? The answer is simple: Speak like people, not like machines… More and more, people are craving authentic experiences from the world around them, and that means a simple human-to-human connection. In our ‘user experience’ world, this means when people use a website, software, product, etc., people should somehow experience the people that created it. Connection.” – Bill DeRouchey
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“If we are going to succeed in anything, especially the ever changing design world, we are going to have to have a strong passion for what we do... Our passion is going to be the driving force behind our motivation (even when we have none) to be the best, to make a contribution to the design community. It will provide the fuel to go the extra mile for clients and for ourselves.” - Aaron Irizarry
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“Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs.” – Patrick Lynch
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“Attractive things work better… When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.” – Don Norman
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“Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people. Along the way, it can generate better profits as well.” – Bruce Nussbaum
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“In an ideal world, social responsibility would be a prerequisite for design, and designers would vow to produce beautiful, useful, positive, responsible, functional, and economical things and concepts that are meaningful additions to—or sometimes subtractions from—the world we live in. Indeed, design deserves such thoughtful consideration.” – Paola Antonelli
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“I’ve come to believe strongly that one of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business, and indeed to everyday life. In my experience, good clients and good designers don’t see this goal as being opposed to—or even separate from—achieving business goals, but rather an integral part of it.” - Michael Bierut
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“Designers don’t actually ‘solve’ problems. They ‘work through’ them. They use non-logical processes that are difficult to express in words but easier to express in action. They use models, mockups, sketches, and stories as their vocabulary. They operate in the space between knowing and doing, prototyping new solutions that arise from their four strengths of empathy, intuition, imagination, and idealism.” - The Designful Company by Marty Neumeier
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“As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.” – Peter Morville
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“Information architecture is at the very center of the electronic information storm. Without effective means to structure and present the information we produce we are blown about by the vast quantities and the variable quality of that information. IA provides you a deep keel and a strong rudder to surf above the waves of information that buffet you.” – Bob Boiko
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“View content less as a means of transacting relationships and more as an opportunity to make them flourish. With that perspective, you will be more likely to take the time to craft content that cultivates deeper relationships with your customers—and that can transform them into your advocates.” - Colleen Jones
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“I believe that all user experience designers are ‘rotten with imperfection’–every time we get something we lust for, we choose something else to want. User experience design is similar; it does NOT end–once you’ve turned over a great finished product… well, it’s not finished. It’s time to evaluate, update and repeat, because users are pretty ‘rotten with imperfection’, themselves. Embrace the rotten-ness. Don’t look forward to the end of a project, look forward to the next opportunity to improve.” - Russ Unger
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“Natural elegance deals with the ‘feel’ a website or application expresses through its behavior over time, and which is rooted in the rules of order that govern nature... It’s possible to create perfectly pleasing websites by focusing only on formal, structural, and logical elegance. But those sites that embrace [natural] elegance feel to users like living beings who speak meaningful words; they are the marriage of form, function, pleasing content, and personal feeling.” - David Sherwin
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“A good user experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances. As UX designers, we orchestrate a complex series of interactions.” - Eric Reiss
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“It’s the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product… experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse all sorts of incidental things.” - Don Norman
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“Savvy design strategists, design researchers, and designers not only seek to deeply understand the client’s business and the end user’s needs of the product, but they also try to deeply understand the connected (and not so connected) interrelationships that factor into the success or failure of the potential offering.” - Tom Dair
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“Design thinkers look past a project to the next project, to the next step in the strategy. They look sideways to the tangents that are affected by the result, and longer term to the investment required as a result of solving the problem currently in front of the team. No problem is solved in isolation—either from the past, or from the future.” - Mark Dziersk
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“Design has been viewed as being aesthetic. Design equals How Something Looks. You see this attitude to design in every part of society—clothing design to interior design, less so in product design, and yes, in web design…. I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.” - Mark Boulton
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“The typical understanding of design is that it’s about aesthetics, styling, or form. This is a limited view. While these are often the tangible outputs of design work, such artifacts are meaningless if they don’t somehow engage a new activity. The measure of success for design is the degree of its impact.” - Peter Merholz
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“People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” - Paola Antonelli
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“[The responsibility of the designer] is to step out of their own perspective, to really exercise their empathy and really completely immerse themselves in the point of view, and the psychological state, of the person who will be using the product.” - Jesse James Garrett
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“Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.” - Ambient Findability by Peter Morville
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“Design is about cultural invention. There are some people who want to reduce the domain of design to listable, knowable stuff, so it’s easy to talk about. Design is a glamorous, glittering world and this means they can engage without having to actually risk themselves on the outcome of their work. This is damaging. It turns design into something terrified of invention. Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome.” - Jack Schulze
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“Remarkable experiences leave a mark—whether the experience is remarkably good, or remarkably bad. These memories are mind-share, essentially brand equity, the capital of brands.” - Niko Nyman
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“As the designer moves from data, to information, to knowledge and then to wisdom, the problem being solved changes from a single dimensional issue of aesthetics or organization to one of selective contextualization, and then to one of experience.” - Jon Kolko
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“Design strategy is about serving people… The real challenge is in trying to solve the human problem. It’s about understanding their needs, their aspirations, and then meeting them in some way. So we are serving them. But sometimes their needs are to be surprised and delighted, and they can’t tell us how to surprise and delight them. That has to come from us as creative people in our profession.” - Chris Hosmer
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“Great design in the end will give us something to relate to, to feel connected with, and to reinforce our humanity. Tapping that right balance between emotion and logic, chaos and control, analog and digital, is the key to this success. We can no longer rely on ‘form follows function.’ Form has to be parallel to function, as function is growing in commodity.” - David Malouf
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“The Web 2.0 architecture still needs much work… As Spiderman’s Uncle Ben pointed out, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Just because we can do all these [Web 2.0] things doesn’t mean we should do them… [It is easy to] imagine designers going wild with the capabilities of this new technology and not using the restraint necessary to ensure they produce an optimal experience.” - Jared Spool
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“Design supports an open approach in which anyone in the organization can participate to generate solutions, make insightful and meaningful decisions, and build empathetic services that address needs that customers themselves may not know they have.” - Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens
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“Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It’s like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits.” - Jeffrey Zeldman
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“Form and function aren’t separate items. If we believe that style somehow exists independent of functionality, that we can treat aesthetics and function as two separate pieces, then we ignore the evidence that beauty is much more than decoration.” - Stephen P. Anderson
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“Paradoxically, when we advocate for the user within our product or service development teams, we are, in effect, simultaneously advocating for the team to our users.” - Michael Cummings
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“Successful businesspeople in all fields endeavor to understand that they are in the business of designing a total customer experience. We call this the customer experience supply chain. The physical product or service is a central part—but, alone, not a sufficient part—of the equation for lasting success. Design is everyone’s job. Doing good design takes more than good designers. It takes a commitment from everybody in the company—soup to nuts, end to end.” - Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery
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“User experience is the center of gravity of a project that pulls the necessary fragments of various design principles and disciplines together giving the finished product that shine, that glow, that luster, that compels and attracts.” - Angel R. Marquez
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“Experience design is more about the kind of experience users actually have than about controlling the experience you try to give them.” - Robin Good
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“Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.” - Aaron Betsky
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“I dream of a day when products fulfill my needs without a glitch, when I am being served swiftly, compassionately and with understanding, by humans and computers alike. Not because I’m a designer and I like good experiences but because good experiences make the world a better place.” - Niko Nyman
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“The members of [cross-functional] teams have to listen carefully to the language used by the other team members, thoughtfully present their own work in terms that the others can understand and over time build enough trust and understanding of one another that they can value, integrate and leverage one another’s expertise… Just as you might do in preparing yourself to visit another country or another culture, design and business leaders must take the time to understand a bit about the place they are visiting—a little of the language, the customs, the ways of thinking.” - Sara Beckman
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“It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives.” - Don Norman
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“Good design is a great combination of common sense, unusual imagination, clarity of purpose–with a prerequisite knowledge of structure, values, color, aesthetic insight and a deep reverence for the love of life.” - Millard Sheets
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“People should never feel like a failure when using technology. Like the customer, the user is always right. If software crashes, it is the software designer’s fault. If someone can’t find something on a web site, it is the web designer’s fault… The big difference between good and bad designers is how they handle people struggling with their design. Technology serves humans. Humans do not serve technology.” - Joshua Porter
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“Information architecture defines the structure of information. Interaction design enables people to manipulate and contribute to that information. Visual design communicates these possibilities to people and creates affinity to them. User experience is the summation of these considerations.” - Luke Wroblewski
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“What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences. If they have great experience with your product [and] they have great experiences with your service, they’re going to be passionate about your brand, they’re going to be committed to it. That’s how you build that kind of commitment.” - Jesse James Garrett
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“You don’t sacrifice the experience for growth; you drive growth from the quality of the experience.” - Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery
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“The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for ‘thinking wrong.’” - The Designful Company by Marty Neumeier
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“Good design at least part of the time, includes the criteria of being direct in relation to the problem at hand–not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.” – Ivan Chermayeff
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“To be truly great, we have to understand the motivation of our clients, maintain constant two-way communication with shockingly uncreative people, get a firm handle on copywriting and how that craft exists symbiotically with the visual element, and foresee how the finished whole will be greater than the sum of the bits and pieces we spent hours obsessing over. All of these factors cascade into the final product.” - Kevin Potts
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“It’s not rocket science. It’s social science – the science of understanding people’s needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance.” - Clement Mok
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“UX suffers when we wall ourselves off from the rest of the organization. Getting people from other disciplines involved gives them the opportunity to feel that you’re all working toward a common goal. At the same time, it gives you the opportunity to advocate user-centered thinking and gain that critical buy-in.” - John Ferrara
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“What I get to do is take that insight into how people think and how people behave and turn it into something, a product or a service, that is going to make their lives better. It’s going to improve their lives in some way that they may not even be able to articulate. To be able to make some small part of their experience better, and all of those little experiences add up to the sum of somebody’s life… the ability to touch people in that way is really profound.” - Jesse James Garrett
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“Instead of a predefined narrative, websites must support the user’s personal story by condensing and combining vast stores of information into something that specifically meets the user’s immediate needs. Thus, instead of an author-driven narrative, Web content becomes a user-driven narrative.” - Jakob Nielsen
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“There are many near-term benefits to applying analytics to user experience design. And the long-term promises so much. So there needs to be a wedding of web analytics and user experience. Designers need to get better with data to finally be able to design for finding, as well as to better communicate with managers, business analysts, and, to a degree, information technologists and developers. Designers will have to learn a foreign language to win them over. That language is data.” - Louis Rosenfeld
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“What UX designers offer that’s special is help building a vision for what the product can and should be. This is not a reductive ‘getting things done’ approach. It’s a generative ‘what does this have the potential to be’ kind of approach. A good UX designer should encourage the team to ask that question, facilitate a process that brings the whole team along in answering it, and then make those answers tangible, doable, and, yes, a little bit pretty.” - Leah Buley
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“No design can exist in isolation. It is always related, sometimes in very complex ways, to an entire constellation of influencing situations and attitudes. What we call a good design is one which achieves integrity – that is, unity or wholeness – in balanced relation to its environment.” - George Nelson
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“I think a successful company is one where everybody owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But the goal when you are actually doing the work is to somehow forget what discipline group you are in and come together. So in that sense, nobody should own user experience; everybody should own it.” - Don Norman
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“I think if you’re starting out early in the process by talking about your ideas for solutions, you’re already not listening. I think you need to enter into any design project with that zen learner’s mind of ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’” - Kim Goodwin
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“My definition of a ‘customer centric’ culture is where people are asking the right questions to the right people, who are able and willing to collaborate to provide their insights. In such a culture, over time, individuals ask the right questions more often and get the right answers more often. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. As this culture takes hold, more and more of the solutions coming out of the group would yield positive customer experiences.” - Secil Watson
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“Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.” - Bill Buxton\'s “personal mantra”
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“User experience is something that cuts right across the organization. It is the tangible manifestation of the organization’s reason for being, translating the brand values into a series of identifiable and actionable experience characteristics. To execute a UX strategy requires the coordinated efforts of the entire organization, and, as such, should sit close to the centre of the organization’s overall strategy.” - Steve Baty
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“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.” - Book Design: A Practical Introduction by Douglas Martin
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“Good design is design that not only achieves a desired effect, but shapes our expectation of what the experience can be.” - Astrida Valigorsky
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“The argument is not between adding features and simplicity, between adding capability and usability. The real issue is about design: designing things that have the power required for the job while maintaining understandability, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment.” - Don Norman
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“Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.” - Tim Brown
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“Your products run for election every day and good design is critical to winning the campaign.” - A.G. Lafley
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“There is no one, right way to design or develop anything. To a large degree, it needs to reflect the culture — especially the innovation culture — of a company.” - Nathan Shedroff
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“You can make a website without explicitly thinking about the IA. You don’t have to use metadata or control your vocabularies or develop thesauri. You don’t have to tweak your search engine and play with recall and precision to improve your results. But it will be better if you do.” - Chiara Fox
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“Design creates stories, and stories create memorable experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.” - Christian Saylor
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“Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply.” - Steve Jobs
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“Features are meaningless. They mean nothing to users. A coherent product user interface is the product to users.” - Kim Goodwin
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“Observe how your users approach information, consider what it means, and design to allow them to achieve what they need.” - Donna Spencer
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“It’s time we designers stop thinking of ourselves as merely pixel people, and start thinking of ourselves as the creators of experiences. And when it comes to experience on the web, there’s no better way to create it than to write, and write well.” - Derek Powazek
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“We shouldn’t assume that the general viewing public is an idiot. We should try to evolve the medium by making intuitive systems that educate the user - not design to what level we think they can handle” - Joshua Davis
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“Design is about demonstrating how beautiful something can be. It has a very profound quality. Design is a way of changing life and influencing the future.” - Sir Ernest Hall
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“Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.” - Jeffrey Zeldman
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“Usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing - whether it’s a web site, remote control, or revolving door - for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.” - Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
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“In our vast search-driven Web, visual design can help people move beyond first impressions and into meaningful interactions.” - Luke Wroblewski
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“The most common misperception is the word ‘design’. People think of primarily pretty pictures or forms. They don’t understand the depth to which design goes—not only in products, but in every aspect of our life. Whether it is the design of a program, a product or some form of communication, we are living in a world that’s totally designed. Somebody made a decision about everything. And it was a design decision.” - Sam Farber
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“Executives can no longer afford to formulate strategy without embracing user experience, and to the extent their offerings include web sites, software products, and interactive services, these leaders (or their successors) must understand the complex interplay between strategy, scope, structure, semantics, skeleton, and surface. They must become experience executives, in concept if not in name.” - Peter Morville
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“The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being.” - Sharon Lee
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“Designers need to be more than ambassadors, they need to be fully functioning and fully aware members of strategic decision-making teams in a company.” - Nathan Shedroff
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“Users want to construct their own experience by piecing together content from multiple sources, emphasizing their desires in the current moment. People arrive at a website with a goal in mind, and they are ruthless in pursuing their own interest and in rejecting whatever the site is trying to push.” - Jakob Nielsen
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“As the advocates for user experience I think it’s important that we’re advocating for everyone’s experience and perhaps doing a little bit more than just whispering the word ‘accessibility’ in a meeting early on and allowing it to be just as easily dismissed. And not just because of the potential legal implications, but because it’s our job.” - Leisa Reichelt
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“Interaction design isn’t only about fixing problems; it’s also about facilitating interactions between people in richer, deeper, better ways - that is, finding new ways to better connect human beings to one another, and by doing so, make the world a better place to live” - Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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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
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“For a human being the product is not an end in itself but the gateway to a plethora of experiences.” - Nokia Design Manifesto
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“The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design” - Massimo Vignelli in the film Helvetica
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.” - Alan Cooper
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“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
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“Each time you consider adding or removing an interface element, put it through the wringer. Is it a necessity or an accessory? Does it support your main message? Remember, it’s better to do one thing well, than many second-rate.” - Luke Wroblewski
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“A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with.” - Jesse James Garrett
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“When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it. When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it. The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it. Good UI design is humble.” - Jono DiCarlo
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“When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it. When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it. The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it. Good UI design is humble.” - Jono DiCarlo
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“Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era - it’s a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.” - Designing Business by Clement Mok
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“The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features.” - Nielsen Norman Group
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“Choice-fatigued consumers are not looking for another product that hasn’t taken their true needs and desires into consideration. They are looking for companies in which to believe and give their allegiance. They are looking for experiences that cater to their deep-seated desires. This type of engagement requires much more than the latest technological breakthrough: It requires emotional engagement.” - Sohrab Vossoughi
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“Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!” - Kathy Sierra
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“Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a ‘neat’ technology or some ‘cool’ product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding—all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience.” - Don Norman
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“When creating great experiences, it’s not so much about doing what users expect. Instead, it’s about creating a design that clearly meets their needs at the instant they need it.” - Jared Spool
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“Think of design as an activity that anyone in the organization can engage with… design is not the purview of some special elite group. Design needs to be embedded as a competency within an organization – something that everybody can get involved with.” - Peter Merholz
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“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.” - Paul Rand
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“Each moment has the potential to increase a user’s confidence or destroy his trust in a product or a company, and each one is an important piece of the whole experience. Why? Because the task a person is attempting to complete at any given moment is the most important task to that person, at that moment. It is our job to make sure nothing goes wrong. To make sure that moment is enjoyable and productive, and helps our user feel smart.” - Designing the Moment by Robert Hoekman Jr.
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“Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.” - Jakob Nielsen
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“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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“To achieve originality we need to abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of our peers, and strike out in new directions” - The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
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“Your site can do much more than mimic your identity. It can encapsulate the brand personality, whether that is inspirational, trustworthy, or authoritative. These traits were part of the reason why they chose your brand in the first place.” - Sharon Lee
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“On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?” - Jakob Nielsen
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“Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but that’s where growth and forgiveness come in.” - Jeffrey Zeldman
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“Information architecture helps make sure that business needs and user needs are met, leaving everyone happy, and isn’t that really what it’s all about?” - Jeff Lash
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“Good design must necessarily, in my opinion, have an impact on people’s lives, no matter how seemingly small. Good design changes things.” - Garr Reynolds
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“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something - chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that… The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.” - Steve Jobs
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“When designing, it’s easy to get lost in the gross interactions – the dialog boxes and system flow. However, the subtleties are just as critical to the success of the design. We need to pay close attention to these nuances as we’re working through our design process.” - Jared Spool
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“Design is about humans creating great works that help or improve the lives of other humans, often in profound ways, and often in ways that are quite small and go unnoticed” - Garr Reynolds
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“Sometimes, you have to design from the gut. The funny thing about the gut is that, rather than experience, the best UX designers I know operate from a perspective of determining what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly.” - Ryan Freitas
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“Each discipline can only go so far with the constraints they work under, and we have to watch each other’s backs and cover for the flaws of each other. Users don’t care whose fault it is that a product works poorly, only that it works poorly. All the disciplines need work together to figure out solutions to product flaws… Focusing on the connective tissue between disciplines makes products holistic.” - Dan Saffer
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“Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user experience. When technology achieves something desirable without being in your face, when it knows how to integrate itself into your wishes and desires without distracting from them, that’s when technology lives up to its potential.” - Andreas Pfeiffer
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“When a business defies the traditional, when it ‘colors outside the lines,’ customers often receive exceptional experiences.” - The Starbucks Experience by Joseph A. Michelli
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“Content makes the sale, delivers the service and builds the brand. The architecture is the container of the website, but content—well, it’s the content in the container. We don’t buy from iTunes because of its architecture; we buy because of its music. Great information architecture is invisible so that the content can shine through.” - Gerry McGovern
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“The customers, the visitors, the patients, the readers, the guests, whatever you call them - their experience is what determines the company’s success or failure. So focus first on the overall experience. It’s strategic, not tactical. It’s about the people, not the tool. Focusing on the larger picture first will set a better context in which to work - later - on usability tactics.” - Mark Hurst
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“Interface design isn’t only about making a device or application look attractive… it’s about making an appropriately pleasing application or device that people find useful and usable and want to integrate into their lives.” - Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
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“Enable brands to move at relationship speed - a threshold reached when every consumer interaction - a bit of data or pattern of behavior - is instantly and intuitively transformed into a relevant, meaningful brand response.” - Brian Kaiser
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“Good designers relentlessly generate lots of ideas and open-mindedly consider alternative solutions. At no time are good designers frightened to entertain a crazy, competing, or uncomfortable idea.” - Karl Ulrich
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“Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion.” - Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications by Bob Baxley
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“Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do, they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.” - Mike Kuniavsky of Adaptive Path
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“If you look at some of the best, most inspirational practitioners in our field you’ll see that they think of their work, not as a job, but as a calling. They see the impact of technology on people’s lives as important. They feel that good design makes the world a better place — and that bad design can make life miserable… So my advice is: find your passion, pursue it and your career will take care of itself.” - David Travis
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“A truly great design is innovative and revolutionary. It’s built on a fresh idea that breaks all previous rules and assumptions but is so elegant it appears simple and natural once it has been created.” - David Ngo
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“Businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage. It is user experience that forms the customer’s impression of the company’s offerings, it is user experience that differentiates the company from its competitors, and it is user experience that determines whether your customer will ever come back.” - The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
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“What exactly does it mean to be a compassionate designer? It means doing things that help us not only understand, but relate to the users we design for. To feel for them. To put ourselves in their shoes, even if our own lives are totally opposite from them. Sound simple? It is. You just have to do it.” - David Armano
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“The designer… has a passion for doing something that fits somebody’s needs, but that is not just a simple fix. The designer has a dream that goes beyond what exists, rather than fixing what exists… the designer wants to create a solution that fits in a deeper situational or social sense.” - David Kelley, Founder of IDEO, in Bringing Design to Software by Terry Winograd
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“Creation is nothing but the reconstitution of existing parts. The components are the same, the combination is new. Become aware of as much of the world as possible. This will form your palette of components. It is up to you to put them in their place.” - Mike Padilla
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“The purpose of user experience design, or UXD, is to understand that user behavior can be seen as part of a holistic experiential model instead of as a shallow, temporary hit-and-run encounter. In the domain of user experience, then, we must not mistake trying something for experiencing it.” -Christopher Fahey
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“Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company’s profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy.” - Jakob Nielsen in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
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“By attending to the entire user experience, designers can create a rich, sensory experience, which helps to immerse users and encourage them to become fully involved in the site and its message… Through immersion, the user experiences joy and satisfaction: positive qualities that will be transferred to your brand.” - Sharon Lee
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“There is a common misconception that usability equals common sense, but actually usability is more than common sense. Although the definition of usability is closely related to logical relevance and common sense, it is very unwise just to rely on common sense in ensuring the usability of a product. Using common sense is not only unwise but sometimes also dangerously misleading.” - Adi B. Tedjasaputra
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“While market researchers describe how the world is, creative people describe how it could be. Their thinking is often so fresh that they zag even when they should zig. But without fresh thinking, there’s no chance of magic” - The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
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“The most important goal of effective communication is clarity. Clarity is not the same as simplicity … Complexity can be made to appear clear by effective organization and presentation and need not be reduced to meaningless ‘bite-sized’ chunks of data, as simplification usually does. Clarity refers to the focus on one particular message or goal at a time, rather than attempting to accomplish too much at once. Simplicity is often responsible for the ‘dumbing’ of information rather than the illumination of it.” - Michael Hoffman
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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity” - Charles Mingus
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“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” - Steve Jobs
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“When we’re trying to understand our ‘users’ and ‘customers,’ we have to remember that they’re people just like us, and just like us they regularly cross understood boundaries and categories… People are inconsistent, often inarticulate, and they challenge social and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways.” - Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens
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“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality” - Walt Disney
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“We can’t forget that customers don’t view a company in terms of silos or business units. They couldn’t care less about how an organization is structured. What they want is an intuitive experience that draws them into an experience that excites their senses.” - Judy McLeish
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“Most digital products today emerge from the development process like a monster emerging from a bubbling tank. Developers, instead of planning and executing with their users in mind, end up creating technological solutions over which they ultimately have little control. Like mad scientists, they fail because they have not imbued their creations with humanity.” - About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper
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“Enough confidence to believe you can solve any design problem and enough humility to understand that most of your initial ideas are probably bad. Enough humility to listen to ideas from other people that may be better than your own and enough confidence to understand that going with other people’s ideas does not diminish your value as a designer. True concern for the comfort and happiness of other people, including your users and your teammates.” - Larry Tesler in Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer on what makes a good interaction designer
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“Design is a form of competitive advantage... Good design allows things to operate more efficiently, smoothly, and comfortably for the user... Customers appreciate good design. While they can’t necessarily point out what specifically makes it good, they know it feels better. There’s a visceral connection. They are willing to pay for it, if you give them a great experience.” - James P. Hackett
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“Without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble for novelty. Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance. Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.” - Paul Rand
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“While great usability is a baseline requirement, there is far more involved in engaging customers on a Web site than simply making sure they can find specific content and perform particular transactions. Today’s mandate is to move beyond traditional usability. Instead of designing only for what visitors can do on a site, superior Web design is now responsible for determining what customers will do.” - Eric Schaffer
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“Form follows function—that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
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“I believe that logic + emotion are a winning combination. When useful and useable meet delight—great things happen. It’s about balance.” - David Armano
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“Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.” - Jared Spool
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“I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration—likely because so much bad design simply is decoration. Good design isn’t. Good design is problem solving.” - The Art & Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen
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“Start with the content. Sometimes designers and developers forget that this is why people come to your site to begin with. Craft it lovingly and serve it to your users with a minimum of distraction, like a well-plated dish; don’t just heap it all together like it’s a buffet. You worked hard on your content… celebrate it. ” - Aaron Gustafson
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“For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they’ll need to do more than hire designers. They’ll need to be designers. They’ll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.” - Marty Neumeier
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“When we blame the user, we teach them that technology is perfect and that the errors are their own. Because technology is hard to use, we are teaching a generation to be afraid of technology. We are teaching a generation to believe in their own stupidity... It’s not the user’s fault.” - Jono DiCarlo
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“Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.” - Dan Brown
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“Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.” - Leisa Reichelt
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“If you want to reach the greatest number of users possible, it’s best to write clearly and simply and design your interfaces to be consistent from page to page. For some people, simple usability advice like this is an absolute accessibility need… And anyway, people of all abilities fail tasks that are confusing. Why should we all suffer an interface that proves itself to be unusable?” - Matt May
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“Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of ‘I can’ than ‘I should’… Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That’s ‘I can’ thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces… But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device… focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.” - John Maeda
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“It’s always helpful to look outside of the web for your inspiration, to places where you might not at first expect to find a solution. The world is a collage of inspiration, from newspapers, magazine publishing, and advertising to product design, architecture and the fine arts.” - Andy Clarke
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“Designing a website can be a bit like being a kid and inheriting a sweetshop. It’s easy to get carried away. There are so many choices. A website can be like an attic that never fills up. Space is not the problem. Attention is.” - Gerry McGovern
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“In the absence of detailed information, we all work from assumptions about who the user is, what he or she does, and what type of system would meet his or her needs. Following these assumptions, we tend to design for ourselves, not for other people.” - Human Factor: Designing Computer Systems for People by Richard Rubinstein and Harry Hersh
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“I view a user experience as a conversation between people separated over the distance of time. At one end of that conversation are those who create the product; at the other, the people who use it. In between is the product itself—with a design that either helps or hinders; creates a barrier-free interaction or shouts in an unfamiliar language. Because this conversation does not happen in real time, we are not there to smooth over the rough spots and make sure that we have spoken clearly. Instead, we have to build our understanding of those users into every aspect of the design, by putting people—users—at the center of the design process.” - Whitney Quesenbery
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“We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro interaction which makes a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious. The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand or service. Little things. Feelings. They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize.” - David Armano
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“Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking — not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we’ll make it better. And that’s an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity.” - Tim Brown
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“The measure of quality in web design should not be good looks, but graceful transformation: pages that can be accessed under different conditions and keep their integrity… A real web designer embraces the medium and designs for maximum inclusivity.” - Sarah Horton
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“It’s standard practice to design with our user’s goals in mind. Too often, though, we tend to focus only on the immediate goals… Although we may produce usable and successful designs, we have ignored the user’s larger context. They may be bored, tired, at work, grinding away at a long term deliverable. They may be entering countless rows of data into a spreadsheet. People love to have fun. Without sacrificing usability, let’s bring a little fun into our designs.” - Loren Baxter
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“Effective information architects make the complex clear; they make the information understandable to other human beings. If they succeed in doing that, they’re good information architects. If they fail, they’re not.” - Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Wurman
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“Good writing for the web is about creating communications in which people can find what they need, understand what they find, and act appropriately on that understanding in the time and effort that they think it is worth. Plain language is part of user-centered design.” - Ginny Redish
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“The ultimate aim of all creative activity is to bring happiness to people’s lives… The success of an experience is measured by the amount of happiness it brings to life and the amount of people willing to live the experience, not by its individual qualities.” - Andrë Braz
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“We all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process? Take the time to really understand them the best you can... Understanding your users not only improves the quality of your work, but also helps move the discussion away from the personal preferences of the client, to the people who’s opinion really matters.” - Paul Boag
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“Innovation lies at the heart of both better design and better business. It magnifies drive inside the organization. It slashes the costs of inefficiency, duplication, and corporate ennui. It confers the ability to produce uncommon, yet practical, responses to real problems.” - The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
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“The experienced web designer[\'s]… job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging. If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.” - Jeffrey Zeldman
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I guess part of what excites me about the Web, and makes me feel good about doing information architecture, is that it helps people get better at sharing information. People have used the metaphor that in creating the Internet we\'re creating a central nervous system for the planet, wiring ourselves together and making the ways that we\'re able to communicate and share information much more fluid. Of course, in order to feel good about that, you have to have a certain amount of optimism that if we enable people to communicate and share information better, they\'ll ultimately make better decisions. - Peter Morville
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“Design has a social function and its true purpose is to improve people’s lives.” - Nokia Design Manifesto
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“Life is conversational. Web design should be the same way. On the web, you’re talking to someone you’ve probably never met - so it’s important to be clear and precise. Thus, well structured navigation and content organization goes hand in hand with having a good conversation.” - Chikezie Ejiasi
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“People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.” - Thomas Mann
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“Users don’t care about convention and heuristics and all of that. Users just want to have a good experience achieving the outcomes they set out to achieve in your site/system/product. Surely we, as experience designers, can not only design a non-problematic experience. Surely we can actually create a pleasurable experience through the way that people interact with our content or functionality.” - Leisa Reichelt
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“Saying that people are the focus of user experience is stating the obvious, but when we are deeply engaged in our own work as user experience designers, it can be difficult to constantly remember to keep people at the center of design. For most of us, it’s hard not to get caught up in the skills and techniques that the technologies we work with require and even harder not to want to use technology to solve problems. But as user experience designers, we need to keep our eye on people.” - Whitney Quesenbery
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It\'s easy to forget, in a world of incredible possibility and infinite creativity, the power of simplicity and the importance of a solid customer experience foundation. This is especially true related to online user experience... As we look forward in anticipation of what\'s to come, it\'s important not to lose sight of managing the founding elements of customer experience. - Leigh Duncan
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You can have information and ease of use and have artistic integrity at the same time. The art of being a good Web designer is getting yourself into that middle ground and treating it as a final destination instead of as a compromise. - Mike Davidson
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“Good web navigation design is not about giving people lots and lots of choices. It is not about second guessing decisions we have made. It’s not about asking what if we want to get back to where we were. It’s about looking forward, not about looking backward.” - Gerry McGovern
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As we explore new human interface devices and incorporate new interactions into our designs, we have the opportunity to create deep connections between users and their technology. - Jonathan Follett
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“People on a design team must be as happy to be wrong as right. If their ideas hold up under strong (but fair) criticism, then great, they can proceed with confidence. If their ideas are rejected with good rationale, then they have learned something. A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right.” - Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
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“The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it’s the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project.” - Kathy Sierra
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“Ultimately, by incorporating your brand into people’s everyday lives, you are given an amazing opportunity to drive home the message that your company is not just routine, but exceptional” - The Starbucks Experience by Joseph A. Michelli
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