Quotes & Sayings About Usability

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. — Jakob Nielsen

I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt. — Steve Krug

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible. — James Dyson

Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered. — Ryan Holmes

Usability is not only about ease of use but also about bringing something meaningful, having an objective in common with the user. — Marcus Osterberg

The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay. — Jeffrey Zeldman

Happy talk must die — Steve Krug

Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it. — Jakob Nielsen

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. — Robert M. Pirsig

Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand. — Donald Norman

Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are
generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues. — Steve Krug

If you don't have people that care about usability on your project, your project is doomed. — Jeff Atwood

There's almost always a plausible rationale - and a good, if misguided, intention - behind every usability flaw. Another — Steve Krug

When fixing problems, always do the least you can. — Steve Krug

It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers. — Brian Kernighan

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. — Theodor Adorno

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account. — Steve Krug

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

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

It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. — Steve Krug

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

When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design. — Steve Krug

Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame — James D. Bradley

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left. — Steve Krug

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum. — Steve Krug

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 understandabili ty, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment. — Donald A. Norman

Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can't use what you can't find. — Peter Morville

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

One thing I've always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they'll tell you, 'We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.' — Bill Gates

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

Usability is the baseline. Your values, aspirations, and dreams are what fills the space above. — Hillel Cooperman

Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you've made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue ("Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%"). There's an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew. — Steve Krug

In reality, though, most of the time we don't choose the best option - we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing. — Steve Krug

The best-known definition of usability is the one from ISO, the International Organization for Standardization (9241-11): "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. — Carol Barnum

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

Don't make me think — Steve Krug

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 anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it. — Steve Krug

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

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

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training. — Jan Chipchase

As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work. — Steve Krug

Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones. — Jakob Nielsen

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it. — John Fowles

A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor. — Eric Schmidt

Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel. — Donald A. Norman

My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster. — Lawrence M. Krauss

A painting doesn't have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people's needs. — Henrik Fisker