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Links & More
Quotes Found for You
By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – Updated: June 30, 2011
On this page we collect quotes from people in the UI and graphic design field. This page will be continually expanded (newest additions are listed first).
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Quote No. 75: Larry TeslerTesler's Law: "Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible
complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user
or the developer (programmer or engineer)." |
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Quote No. 74: Don Norman"Designers can transform otherwise confusing systems into understandable
ones. But if the systems are dealing with complex activities, that
doesn't mean that the result will be immediately understandable and
usable. In the end, the burden is on those who use them." |
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Quote No. 73: Don Norman"A single example of a simple thing is just that: simple. But when
there are many simple things, each with its own rules of operation,
the result is complexity. [...] Everyday life is often complex, not
because any given activity is complex, but because there are so many
apparently simple activities, each with its own set of idiosyncratic
requirements." |
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Quote No. 72: Don Norman"Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who will
use them? Answer: because people want the features. Because the so-called
demand for simplicity is a myth whose time has passed, if it ever existed." |
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Quote No. 71: Don Norman"[Machines] are often designed by technically centric people who are
far more concerned about the welfare of their machines than the welfare
of the people who will use them. The logic of machines is imposed on
people, human beings who do not work by the same rules of logic. As
a result, we have species clash, for we are two different species,
people and technology." |
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Quote No. 70: Don Norman"The keys to coping with complexity are to be found in two aspects
of understanding. First is the design of the thing itself. ... Second
is our own set of abilities and skills. ... Understandability and
understanding: Two critical keys to mastery. The major issue is understanding:
things we understand are no longer complicated, no longer confusing." |
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Quote No. 69: Jeff Johnson"Following user-interface design guidelines is not as straightforward
as following cooking recipes. Design rules often describe goals rather
than actions. They are purposefully very general to make them broadly
applicable, but that means that their applicability to specific design
situations is open to interpretation." |
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Quote No. 68: Jeff Johnson"Unfortunately, with a few exceptions ..., user-interface design guidelines
are provided as simple lists of design edicts with little or no rationale
or background." |
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Quote No. 67: Jeff Johnson"[...] Interaction design is a skill, not something than
anyone can do by following a recipe. Learning that skill amounts to
learning not only what the design guidelines are but also how to recognize
which rules to follow in each design situation." |
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Quote No. 66: Nathan Shedroff"Designers are taught to make 'new' when it isn't really
better or when 'old' doesn't need replacing." |
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Quote No. 65: Nathan Shedroff"Design
that is about appearance, or margins, or offerings and market segments,
and not about real people – their needs, abilities, desires,
emotions, and so
on – that's the design that is the problem. The design
that is about systems
solutions, intent, appropriate and knowledgeable integration of people,
planet, and profit, and the design that, above all, cares about customers
as people and not merely consumers – that's the design
that can lead to
healthy, sustainable solutions." |
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Quote No. 64: Nathan Shedroff"Design requires decisions that narrow possibilities, ultimately until
there is one solution. Designing more sustainable offerings may require
you to balance inputs and outcomes and, often, compromise. It's
rare, in fact, that you'll achieve everything that you want." |
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Quote No. 63: Alan Cooper"Over the years, when interaction designers ask me which design
technique works best, I have assured them that this is not so much
a battle of technique as it is a struggle for power. The same holds
true today as we, the responsible craftsmen, wrestle power away from
those people who insist on living in the past." |
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Quote No. 62: Alan Cooper"In the design world, I have seen a clear difference between those
design practices that are craft-based and those that are art-based.
The latter is based on someone's opinion, while the former is based
on the demonstrable improvement in the actual end user's experience." |
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Quote No. 61: Alan Cooper"Designers argue endlessly about the differences between User
Experience Designers and Interaction Designers; which is better,
contextual enquiry or goal-directed design? Or whether personas
are real or just made up.
Like all of you, I have a position in these battles. I'm in support
of
what works best." |
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Quote No. 60: Alan Cooper"The craft of agile has clearly demonstrated its immense power to
enhance software development. It has proven its ability to deliver
better quality software, in far less time, and with happier teams.
Similarly,
the craft of interaction design has demonstrated great power to enhance
the quality of the software user's experience.
Skillfully applied, interaction design can also speed the delivery
of better quality software, in less time, with happier teams." |
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Quote No. 59: Brenda Laurel"Designers have their own 'old' models to contend with.
Brand/identity designer David Canaan wryly observes that most designers
seem to see their mission as 'educating the general public about
good taste.' But
over the last decade, the balance of power between those who sell products
or services and those who buy them has undergone radical change. Thanks
in part to the rise of the Web, communication between companies and audiences
has moved from one-way-persuasion to two-way dialogs about needs, desires,
problems and dreams." |
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Quote No. 58: David Canaan"Creative people share 3 common traits: 1. the ability to make new
associations from unrelated elements, 2. willingness to pursue an idea
they know they will ultimately reject, and 3. tolerance for ambiguity
over time." |
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Quote No. 57: Jonathan Ive"Perhaps the decisive factor [that distinguishes the products
that his team at Apple Inc. develops] is fanatical care beyond the
obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked.
... So many companies are competing against each other with similar
agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the
products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern
of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking
the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make
something better." |
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Quote No. 56: Graham Pullin"The design issues around disability are underexplored, and demand
and deserve far more radical approaches, whereas art school iconoclasm
is conspicuous by its absence. What is needed is truly interdisciplinary
design thinking, combining and blurring design craft with engineering
brilliance, therapeutic excellence, and the broadest experiences of
disabled people." |
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Quote No. 55: Graham Pullin"Good design often requires the courage to value simplicity over
being 'all things to all people.' This might conflict with some definitions
of universal design, yet at the same time it can actually make a design
more accessible because simple products are often the most cognitively
and culturally inclusive." |
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Quote No. 54: Graham Pullin"If there is a welcome change in our approach to disability,
it follows that the role of design needs to change too, and therefore
the nature of the design teams must change as well. Design
processes need to become more inclusive in several ways, involving
not only disabled people themselves but also a greater diversity of
designers. ... Art school design disciplines are as essential to the
mix as engineering and human factors." |
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Quote No. 53: Ben Shneiderman*"Improved messages will be of the greatest benefit to novice
users, but regular users and experienced professionals will also benefit;
... . As examples of excellence proliferate, complex, obscure, and
harsh interfaces will seem increasingly out of place. The crude environments
of the past will be replaced gradually by interfaces designed with
the users in mind." |
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Quote No. 52: Ben Shneiderman*"Improving error messages is one of the easiest and most effective
ways to improve an existing interface." |
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Quote No. 51: Ben Shneiderman*"Recognition of the creative challenge of balancing function
and fashion might be furthered by having designers put their names
and photos on a title or credits page, just as authors do in a book.
... Credits provide recognition for good work and identify the people
responsible. Having their names in lights may also encourage designers
to work even harder, since their identities will be public." |
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Quote No. 50: Ben Shneiderman*"Is the modern era of employee multitasking between numerous
applications coupled with routine office distractions spreading us
too thin, adding stress, and drastically reducing productivity, ultimately
affecting corporate profits?" |
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Quote No. 49: Ben Shneiderman*"The introspective and isolated style of past computer use has
given way to a lively social environment where training has to include
netiquette (network etiquette) and cautions about flame wars." |
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Quote No. 48: Ben Shneiderman*"Developing successful online and networked communities is not
easy, as revealed by the thousands of electronic ghost towns without
any participants." |
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Quote No. 47: Ben Shneiderman*"The good news is that computing, once seen as alienating and
antihuman, is becoming a socially respectable and interpersonally positive
force." |
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Quote No. 46: Kevin O'Regan"... seeing constitutes an active process of probing
the external environment as though it were a continuously available external
memory. This allows one to understand why, despite the poor quality
of the visual apparatus, we have the subjective impression of great richness
and 'presence' of the visual world: But this richness and presence are
actually an illusion, created by the fact that if we so much as faintly
ask ourselves some question about the environment, an answer is immediately
provided by the sensory information on the retina, possibly rendered
available by an eye movement." |
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Quote No. 45: Don Norman "The power of the unaided
mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and
reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible
and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome
its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that
enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought, and
reasoning? By the invention of external aids: It is things that make
us smart." |
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Quote No. 44: Colin Ware "Visual thinking consists
of a series of acts of attention, driving eye movements and tuning
our pattern-finding circuits. These actions are called visual
queries, und understanding how visual queries work can make us
better designers." |
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Quote No. 43: Colin Ware "We can now begin to develop
a science of graphic design based on a scientific understanding of
visual attention and pattern perception." |
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Quote No. 42: Bill Buxton "Even if you do a brilliant
job of building what you originally set out to build, if it is the
wrong product, it still constitutes a failure. Likewise you also fail
if you build the right product the wrong way. Stated another way, we
must adopt an approach that inherently aspires to get the right
design as well as get the design right." |
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Quote No. 41: Bill Buxton "My belief is that one of
the most significant reasons for the failure of organizations to develop
new software products in-house is the absence of anything that a design
professional would recognize as an explicit design process." |
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Quote No. 40: Bill Buxton "The only way to engineer
the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday." |
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Quote No. 39: Bill Buxton "Hardly a day goes by that
we don't see an announcement for some new product or technology that
is going to make our lives easier, solve some or all of our problems,
or simply make the world a better place. However, the reality is that
few of these products survive, muss less deliver on their typically
over-hyped promise. But are we learning from these expensive mistakes?
Very little, in my opinion." |
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Quote No. 38: Harold Thimbleby "Another [danger sign] is
how computers encourage us to make our society more and more complex – in
fact, our laws (tax being a good example) are so complicated that it
would be hard to stay in business without a computer to help. If the
government assumes every business has a computer, then it can impose
regulations that only a computer can cope with." |
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Quote No. 37: Harold Thimbleby "As designers, we don't
want to moan, but make the world a better place." |
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Quote No. 36: Jeff Johnson "When a software product
is not responsive enough, programmers tend to blame poor algorithms
and inefficient implementation. They try to improve the algorithms
and tune the performance of the application's functions. Their ideal
is that all functions should execute as close to instantaneously as
possible. This causes delays in release dates while programmers try
to speed up unacceptably 'slow' products. The software is
often eventually released event though it is still slower than developers,
managers, and customers had hoped." |
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Quote No. 35: Jeff Johnson "Programmers often blame
poor responsiveness on slow computer hardware. According to this view,
poor responsiveness is a trivial problem because higher performance
computers will soon be available, and upgrading to those will solve
the problem. This view ignores history: in the past 25 years, computer
power and speed have increased by a factor of several hundred or more,
yet responsiveness is still as much of a problem as ever." |
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Quote No. 34: Rich Gold "Creativity is making something
new that also opens up a new category, a new genre, or a new type of
thing. ... But there is another meaning of the word creative that
also has a qualitative connotation: It's not just something that has
never been before, but it is something good, or useful, or communicative,
or impressive, or beautiful and that a few people would buy for large
amounts of money or that lots of people would buy for a small amount." |
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Quote No. 33: Rich Gold "The sense of eternalness
in our culture comes from everything being ever new. This is at the
core of our culture. We must make things to get money to buy other
things, including food and shelter. And since we can't make what others
are making – by law and by the laws of the marketplace – it
is only through creativity and innovation that we survive." |
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Quote No. 32: Rich Gold "For an artist user-testing
is a joke. For a designer it is fundamental. If an artist looks inward
as a way of seeing the world, the designer looks outward towards others.
An artist paints a painting, stares at it, and says, “isn't it
beautiful, it expresses my inner vision perfectly.” The designer
paints a painting, stares at, then turns it around to the audience
and asks “Do you like it? No? Then I'll change it.”" |
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Quote No. 31: Sarah Horton "Partnering with users requires
two things: First, we have to design for transformation. Our pages
must have flexible elements, and the overall design must uphold to
change. Second, we need to recognize and respect the boundaries of
the user domain." |
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Quote No. 31: Sarah Horton "Partnering with users requires
two things: First, we have to design for transformation. Our pages
must have flexible elements, and the overall design must uphold to
change. Second, we need to recognize and respect the boundaries of
the user domain." |
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Quote No. 30: Sarah Horton "Until this time [that is,
before the introduction of 'users' into the Web design process], I
felt my role as a designer was to make decisions about the design of
my pages on behalf of the user, based on what I knew on graphic, interface,
and information design. Once I started with users, I could derive design
decisions by observing user behavior and feedback." |
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Quote No. 29: Sarah Horton "Making decisions – that
is the task of the designer. Good decisions have a basis: a purpose
to uphold and best practices to achieve that purpose." |
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Quote No. 28: Mary Frances Theofanos & Janice Redish "Meeting the required accessibility standards does not ... necessarily mean that a Web site is usable for people with disabilities. And if a Web site is not usable, it is not really accessible, even if it has all the elements required by the law." |
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Quote No. 27: Ben Shneiderman "More time is wasted in front of computers than on highways." |
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Quote No. 26: Don Norman"Designers go astray for several reasons. First, the reward structure of the design community tends to put aesthetics first. ... Second, designers are not typical users. ... Third, ... designers must please their clients, and the clients may not be the users." |
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Quote No. 25: Don Norman"The paradox of technology – the same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use – should never be used as an excuse for poor design. It is true that as the number of options and capabilities of any device increase, so too must the number and complexity of the controls. But the principles of good design can make complexity manageable." |
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Quote No. 24: Don Norman"Of course, people do make errors. Complex devices will always require some instruction, and someone using them without instruction should expect to make errors and to be confused. But designers should take special pains to make errors as cost-free as possible." |
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Quote No. 23: Don Norman"If an error is possible, someone will make it. The designer must assume that all possible errors will occur and design so as to minimize the chance of the error in the first place, or its effect once it gets made. Errors should be easy to detect, they should have minimal consequences, and, if possible, their effects should be reversible." |
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Quote No. 22: David Kelley "Interaction design started from two separate directions, with screen graphics for displays and separate input devices, but it got more interesting when the hardware and software came together in products. Then along came the information appliance, implying that technology would start to fit into our everyday lives, and when the Internet connected everything together, we found ourselves designing complete experiences." |
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Quote No. 21: Cordell Ratzlaff "As interaction designers, we need to remember that it is not about the interface, it's about what people want to do! To come up with great designs, you need to know who those people are and what they are really trying to accomplish." |
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Quote No. 20: John Maeda "The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees – to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less." |
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Quote No. 19: John Maeda "Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification For the consumer to get less and pay more seems to contradict sound economic principles. ... Yet in spite of the logic of demand, 'simplicity sells.' ... The undeniable commercial success of the Apple iPod – a device that does less but costs more than other digital music players – is a key supporting example of this trend. ... People not only buy, but more importantly love, designs that can make their lives simpler." |
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Quote No. 18: Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini "Make HCI bugs 'first-class' bugs like engineering bugs." |
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Quote No. 17: Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza "Interestingly, all the user-centered mantras in HCI have repeated the need to know the users. This is undeniably a fundamental requirement for designing good products. But we have never seen a suggestion that users should know designers." |
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Quote No. 16: John Thackara "When continuous acceleration is the default tempo of innovation, it leads to 'feature bloat' in products and the phenomenon, which we are seeing now, of customers who resist the pressure to upgrade devices or software continually." |
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Quote No. 15: Jef Raskin"Once the product's task is known, design the interface first;
then implement to the interface design. ... As far as the customer is
concerned, the interface is the the product." |
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Quote No. 14: John Carroll"The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem." |
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Quote No. 13: Malcolm McCullough"The prevailing computer-human interaction (CHI) model of interface design has been partly responsible for the current state of the desktop computer. The breakthrough on which the field emerged was the admission of psychological principles. The resulting graphical user interface has been the focus of the field of computer-human interaction for nearly 20 years. This interface is a virtual control panel whose design has remained quite technology-centered." |
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Quote No. 12: Malcolm McCullough"..., current interfaces illustrate how many computer scientists are biased toward efficiency with technological resources rather than human attention; or to put it bluntly, toward convenience for computers before convenience for people." |
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Quote No. 11: Malcolm McCullough"Graphical user interfaces have long been built on principles of shifting focus – picking up a tool, opening and closing a window, etc. – but they still leave us staring at a cluttered screen. " |
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Quote No. 10: Sarah Kuhn"Most people who encounter computer-based automation at work do not choose the software with which they work, and have comparatively little control over when and how they do what they do. For them, the use of computers can be an oppressive experience, rather than a liberating one. " |
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Quote No. 9: Laura De Young"It is pointless – perhaps even damaging – to conduct usability tests merely because testing is fashionable or required by management. ... If designers do not have the time, energy, or authority to make changes, or if they are too deeply attached to their design to be willing to change it, there is no point in asking customers what they want." |
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Quote No. 8: Peter Denning and Pamela Dargan"The standard engineering design process produces a fundamental blindness to the domains of actions in which the customers of software live and work." |
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Quote No. 7: Paul Saffo"We use tools to accomplish tasks, and we abandon tools when the effort required to make the tool deliver exceeds our threshold of indignation. ... (... the threshold of indignation (is) the maximal behavioral compromise that we are willing to make to get a task done.)" |
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Quote No. 6: Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor"If interaction design is considered only at the end, software is driven by engineering design, of which users are rightly unaware, rather than by representations with which they interact." |
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Quote No. 5: David Liddle"Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience." |
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Quote No. 4: Mitchell Kapor"Despite the enormous outward success of personal computers, the daily experience of using computers far too often is still fraught with difficulty, pain, and barriers for most people.... The lack of usability of software and the poor design of programs are the secret shame of the industry." |
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Quote No. 3: Ben Shneiderman"The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies are those that are in harmony with users' needs. They must support relationships and activities that enrich the users' experiences." |
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Quote No. 2: Don Norman"Although the computer has changed dramatically since the 1980s, the basic way we use it hasn't. The Internet and World Wide Web give much more power, much more information, along with more things to lose track of, more places to get lost in. More ways to confuse and confound. It's time to start over." |
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Quote No. 1: Don Norman"Making everything visible is great when you only have twenty things. When you have twenty thousand, it only adds to the confusion." |
