“Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”
— Jakob Nielsen
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest.”
— Jean-Louis Gassée
“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
“If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.”
— Alan Cooper
“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.”
— Jef Raskin
“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”
— Brian Reed
“The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity.”
— Jon Bolt
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates
“If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Llyod Wright, and Pablo Picasso could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?”
— Paul Heckel
“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master”
— Milton Glaser
“There’s a big difference between making a simple product & making a product simple.”
— Des Traynor
“Good designers want to be proved wrong, bad designers hope to be proved right.”
— Andy Budd
“At the end of the day is how the user remembers the experience. Focus on key experiences.”
— Shawn Borsky
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
— Dr. Ralf Speth
“Designers shooting for usable is like a chef shooting for edible.”
— Aarron Walter
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
— Douglas Adams
“Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.”
— Dana Chisnell
“Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”
— Mark Twain
“Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information.”
— Edward R Tufte
“The ultimate design is little different from the natural world.”
— Kenji Ekuan
“The design of good houses requires an understanding of both the construction materials and the behavior of real humans.”
— Peter Morville
“Usability is not a quality that can be spread out to cover a poor design like a layer of peanut butter.”
— Clayton Lewis
“If you just keep adding features without considering overall structure, your app becomes like the Winchester Mystery House.”
— Peter Merholz
“If there’s a ‘trick’ to it, the UI is broken.”
— Douglas Anderson
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
— William Butler Yeats
“I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.”
— Lindon Leader
“A beautiful product that doesn’t work very well is ugly.”
— Jony Ive
“Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe.”
— John Maeda
“Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.”
— Ralph Caplan
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
— John Maeda
“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
“I’m very font of you because you’re just my type.”
— Unknown
“Embrace the failure.”
— Milton Glaser
“When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”
— Abraham Maslow
“Want to grow as a designer? Spend most of your time thinking about how it works, as opposed to how it looks.”
— Josh Puckett
“Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.”
— Mieke Gerritzen
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
— Confucious
“Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.”
— Jeffery Veen
“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”
— Joe Sparano
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
— Futurama
“To create a memorable design, you need to start with a thought that’s worth remembering.”
— Thomas Manss
“On feedback: Pay attention when someone tells you something seems wrong. Ignore them when they tell you how to fix it.”
— Jeffrey Veen
“There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and Wow. Wow is the one to aim for.”
— Milton Glaser
“Rule of thumb for UX: More options more problems.”
— Scott Belsky
“What works good is better than what looks good. Because what works good lasts.”
— Ray Eames
“Customers always know what’s wrong. They can’t always tell you what they want, but they always can tell you what’s wrong.”
— Carly Fiorina
“As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.”
— Norman Foster
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
— Charles Kettering
“From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.”
— Adrian Frutiger
“Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.”
— Milton Glaser
“My job as a designer is to look into the future. Not to use any frame of reference that exists”
— Marc Newson
“People ignore design that ignores people.”
— Frank Chimero
“There’s only 3 ways to understand people: what they do, what they say, what they make”
— Dan Makoski
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
— Seth Godiin
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
— E. F. Schumacher
“The relationship between the user and the product should grow as the relationship between the couple — from the first date to a happy marriage.”
— Rahul Sen
“Designers are afraid of incremental design but to launch faster you need an incremental vision.”
— Katie Dill
“A good user experience isn’t necessarily that far removed from a poor user experience. It can be small, subtle differences that can have a huge impact.”
— Nathanael Boehm
“Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one solution remains.”
— Unknown
“Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.”
— John D. Berry
“Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.”
— William Zinsser
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
— Yoda
“Every great design begins with an even better story.”
— Lorinda Mamo
“While there is good design, there is no perfect design.”
— Alexandra Daisy
“The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease.”
— Massimo Vignelli
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.”
— Scott Adams
“Your customers are your compass. Listen to their frustrations, and they’ll guide you to your next amazing feature.”
— Stephanie Briones
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
— Elon Musk
“Practice safe design: Use a concept.”
— Petrula Vrontikis
“The best kind of design isn’t necessarily an object, a space or a structure: it’s a process – dynamic and adaptable.”
— Don Norman
“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
“The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.”
— Edward Tufte
“To simplify complications is the first essential of success.”
— George Earle Buckle
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
— Andy Grove
“I think about architecture all the time. That’s the problem. But I’ve always been like that. I dream it sometimes.”
— Zaha Hadid
“There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.”
— Massimo Vignelli
“Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.”
— Mieke Gerritzen
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
— Hans Hofmann
“We don’t make product decisions to make our lives easier, we make product decisions to make our customers lives easier.”
— Josh Brewer
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
— Joseph Chilton Pearce
“People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.”
— Thomas Mann
“Wonderfully designed > beautifully designed. Any day.”
— Daniel Burka
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”
— Don Norman
“Design isn’t just wire frames or visual style; it’s about the product as a whole.”
— Sahil Lavingia
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
— Orson Welles
“Not only can a designer change the world, a designer should. This is the best job in the world! Let’s do it right..”
— Mike Monteiro
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
— Elon Musk
“Critique is at the core of collaboration… Critique is not a design skill. Critique is a life skill.”
— Adam Connor
“Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.”
— Edward Tufte
“Self promotion doesn’t help you become a better designer. Doing a lot of design work makes you a better designer.”
— Daniel Burka
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
— Scott Belsky
“Talk to one user… start jumping to a solution. Talk to 5+ users… start understanding the problem.”
— Luke Wroblewski
“Everyone’s rewarded for making new things. We should be rewarded for improving old things.”
— Amber Case
“When making art, you’re not going from a known point A to a known point B. You are inventing point B.”
— Amy Whitaker
“Quality is a bar, not a tradeoff.”
— Julie Zhuo
“To simplify complications is the first essential of success.”
— George Earle Buckle
“Design to enhance lives, not KPIs”
— Joe Tosca
“When you become a leader, it’s not enough to understand design. You now need to understand how design moves the needle.”
— Christina Wodtke
“Confidence is believing you’re good. Cockiness is believing you’re better than anyone else. Leaders need to be confident, not cocky.”
— Simon Sinek
“Don’t be a complainer; make things better, let it go, or take action to make it better.”
— Tina Roth Eisenberg
“Design is subjective only if you’re too lazy to make it objective.”
— Dan Mall
“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.”
— Clayton Christensen
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
— Jessica Hische
“Your design should always be telling a story. And that story needs to be told from the user’s perspective — not the business’s perspective.”
— Tom Tancredi
“When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as “SOME User Experience” or… SUX?”
— Billy Gregory
“As great as your user interface is, it would be better if there were less of it”
— Alan Cooper
“To design is to be intentional about the outcome we want.”
— Julie Zhuo
“Your old site is the best prototype of your new site.”
— Hoa Lorangers
Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.”
— Matt Beale
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”
— Robert L. Peters
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
— Scott Adams
“Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.”
— IBM
“The users get to define their own desires. Your job is to serve the user and their desires.”
— Chelsea Mauldin
“We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. The focus is not the product, but the customer.”
— Jeff Bezos
“UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reins. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope and cattle.”
— Dain Miller
“Doing is one of the best forms of thinking.”
— Tom Chi
“A good UX Designer always asks: What user need does this address? What are we hoping to achieve by doing this? How will we measure success?”
— Nick Finck
“A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.”
— Jakob Nielsen
“Great UX designers–those that are deliberate, thoughtful, thorough–are like superheroes. Make sure they’re using their powers for good.”
— Dan Brown
“Design shouldn’t be a step in the process, it should inform all product stages.”
— Kristin Skinner
“Design is only obvious in retrospect.”
— Luke Wroblewski
“Technology over technique produces emotionless design.”
— Daniel Mall
“Young designers, you need battle wounds. You need to fail. You need scars. Be curious and don’t ask for permission. ”
— Joel Beukelman
“I believe the easier way to describe simplicity is being devoid of unnecessary complexity.”
— Gabriel Colombo
“Creativity is the act of making obvious things that aren’t yet obvious.”
— Bill Buxton
“The design process is weird and complicated because it involves people, who are weird and complicated.”
— Mark Boulton
“Beauty & brains, pleasure & usability: these should go hand in hand.”
— Don Norman
“Because every person knows what he likes, every person thinks he is an expert on user interfaces.”
— Paul Heckel
“Not everyone is a designer, but everybody has to have the user as their north star.”
— Phil Gilbert
“Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
— Margaret Oscar
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
“Be stimulated by rejection.”
— Bob Gil
“Sometimes too much intent destroys the genius of the accidental.”
— James Jean
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”
— Robert Peters
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make that dream a reality.”
— Walt Disney
“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
— Elon Musk
“Never delegate understanding.”
— Charles Eames
“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”
— Jony Ive
“Design principles, when we chose them effectively, become the driving rationale behind our future design decisions.”
— Jared Spool
“A good user experience isn’t necessarily that far removed from a poor user experience. It can be small, subtle differences that can have a huge impact.”
— Nathanael Boehm
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”
— Charles Eames
“If you can design one thing you can design everything.”
— Massimo Vignelli
“Good design doesn’t date.”
— Harry Seidler
“Experts are rarely insulted by something that is clear enough for beginners. Everybody appreciates clarity.”
— Steve Krug
“Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.”
— Thomas Carlyle
“Interdisciplinary collaboration produces more interesting and innovative ideas.”
— Julia Kafanskiy
“Creating an interface is much like building a house: If you don’t get the foundations right, no amount of decorating can fix the resulting structure.”
— Jef Raskin
“Design is about the rendering of intent.”
— Andrea Mignolo
“Design is more than designers.”
— Kate Aronowitz
“You have to start with the customer experience and work your way back to technology.”
— Steve Jobs
“To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.”
— Julie Zhou
“The greatest sin of a designer is the silo.”
— Erin Hoffman-John