#1 In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive soft drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.

— Donald A. Norman

#2 “The most common user action on a Website is to flee.”

— Edward Tufte, Information Design Guru

#3 “Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.”

— Dana Chisnell

#4 “Usability testing is the killing field of cherished notions.”

— David Orr

#5 “Usability is not a quality that can be spread out to cover a poor design like a layer of peanut butter.”

— Clayton Lewis

#6 “Usability is not only about ease of use but also about bringing something meaningful, having an objective in common with the user.”

— Marcus Österberg, Web Strategy for Everyone

#7 Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.   

— Jakob Nielsen

#8 “We tend to be distracted by the voices in our own heads telling us what the design should look like.”

— Michael Bierut

#9 “There is beauty when something works and works intuitively.” 

— Jonathon Ive

#10 “Usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.” 

 — Steve Krug

#11 “If a User is having a problem, it’s our problem.” 

— Steve Jobs

#12 “Asking users to adopt new behaviors or even modify their existing behaviors is very, very hard.” 

— Khoi Vin

#13 “The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.” 

— Blake Aaron Ross

#14 “A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”

— Donald A. Norman

#15 “To create a memorable design, you need to start with a thought that’s worth remembering.” 

— Thomas Manss  

#16 “UI is the saddle, the stirrups, & the reins. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse.”

— Dain Miller, Web Developer

#17 “If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly any more  You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.” 

— Steve Krug

#18 “Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”

— Don Norman

#19 “Good design means never having to say ‘Click Here’.”

— Shawn Leslie

#20 “Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human nature to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives.” 

— John Heskett, British writer

#21 “Usability is critical for any application, but for mass-market software, usability spells success or failure more clearly than any other feature.”   

— Jerrold Grochow

#22 “A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time.” 

— Jakob Nielson

#23 “In God we Trust. All others must bring Data.” 

— W Edwards Deming

#24 “The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web.”

— Jakob Nielsen

#25 “Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that’s completely inaccessible.”

— James Dyson

#26 “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”.

— Hans Hofmann

#27 “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.”   

— Steve Krug

#28 “Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability – they should go hand in hand.”

— Donald A. Norman

#29 “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

#30 “A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time.”

— Jakob Nielsen

#31 “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#32 “…pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”

— Jakob Nielsen

#33 “A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.”

— Ben Shneiderman

#34 “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.”

— Jef Raskin

#35 “You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint

#36 “Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#37 “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

— Joel Spolsky

#38 “To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”

— Milton Glaser

#39 “The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouseclick away.”

— Jakob Nielsen

#40 “Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.”

— Jakob Nielsen

#41 “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.”

— Donald A. Norman

#42 “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

#43 “Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.”

— Peter Morville

#44 “Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.”

— Donald A. Norman

#45 “If you don’t have people that care about usability on your project, your project is doomed.”

— Jeff Atwood

#46 “Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.”

— Alan Cooper

#47 “I get very uncomfortable when someone makes a design decision without customer contact.”

— Dan Ritzenthaler, Sr. Product Designer at Iora Health

#48 “How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”

— Andrew Grove, former CEO at Intel Corp

#49 “It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and highly contextual information.”

— Paul Maritz, CEO at Pivotal

#50 “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

#51 “Usability does not equate to a specific number of clicks, taps, swipes, pinches, flicks.”

— John Morkes

#52 “Designers shooting for usable is like a chef shooting for edible.”

— Aarron Walter

#53 80% of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning.”

— Roger Black

#54 “Every click is an opportunity to lose prospects.”

— Bryan Eisenberg

#55 “It helps to bring in an objective outsider to give the business some perspective. Remain impartial about internal politics or who suggested past ideas. The business needs an unbiased verdict, without the emotional attachment it has invested in its own efforts.”

— Bryan Eisenberg

#56 “Directories – such as Yahoo and Looksmart – often reject sites with broken links. Studies show that 71% of Web sites have at least 1 bad link.”

— Netmechanic

#57 “Usability answers the question, “Can the user accomplish their goal?”

— Dr. Joyce Lee

#58 “Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. It’s a way to let our ideals shine through in our software, no matter how mundane the software is. You may think that you’re stuck in a boring, drab IT department making mind-numbing inventory software that only five lonely people will ever use. But you have daily opportunities to show respect for humanity even with the most mundane software.”

— Joel Spolsky

#59 “Usability plays a much wider role in our lives than most people realize. It’s not

just about using a website, a piece of software, or the latest technology. Usability is

about setting up a tent, relighting a furnace to heat a home, trying to figure out a

tax form, or driving an unfamiliar rental car. Usability impacts everyone, every day.

It cuts across cultures, age, gender, and economic class.”

— Thomas Tullis

#60 “Usability cost-benefit data shows that including usability in product development actually cuts the time to market and increases sales because usability and ease of use build quality into products and catch many expensive problems early on in the cycle when they can be addressed at lower cost. Finally, working with users from the beginning of a product cycle ensures that the product is being designed so that users will be satisfied. 

— Claire Marie Karat