User Quotes & Sayings

If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. — Bill Bryson

I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners. — Don Bluth

The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important. — Kenneth E. Iverson

people need simple, secure, powerful, integrated, and user-friendly ways to create, consume, purchase, share, and manage their content. — Phil Simon

The most common user action on a Web site is to flee. — Edward Tufte

We learned that very few people care how you accomplish something. Instead, these people care more about whether you create value for your end user. — Colin Angle

Rent is the portion of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the user of the original and indestructible powers of the soil — David Ricardo

Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly ... — Ada Louise Huxtable

The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base. — Paul Vixie

The methods that will most effectively minimize the ability of intruders to compromise information security are comprehensive user training and education. Enacting policies and procedures simply won't suffice. Even with oversight the policies and procedures may not be effective: my access to Motorola, Nokia, ATT, Sun depended upon the willingness of people to bypass policies and procedures that were in place for years before I compromised them successfully. — Kevin Mitnick

Tantra like any raw power is defined by the wisdom of its user — Anupama Garg

The rifle is a weapon. Let there be no mistake about that. It is a tool of power, and thus dependent completely upon the moral stature of its user. It is equally useful in securing meat for the table, destroying group enemies on the battlefield, and resisting tyranny. In fact, it is the only means of resisting tyranny, since a citizenry armed with rifles simply cannot be tyrannized. — Jeff Cooper

Figure 1-3. The User Experience Honeycomb. Along — Peter Morville

Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. — Alan Kay

Perhaps the most versatile and useful plug-in in the collection is Mass Copy. It is certainly the one I use the most. Due to limitations in how plugins can interact with Finale, Mass Copy has a somewhat unusual user interface. — Robert Patterson

I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks. — Matt Mullenweg

Most druids fall into two groups: sticks or stones. Wood has some wonderful properties, but it has a tendency to react too much with the user for my particular taste. Because they retain some of their own innate essence, using wands becomes almost a partnership. You have to be very nature-oriented to use them to their best advantage. — Mark Del Franco

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. — Jakob Nielsen

I could take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin user. — John Lydon

DivX Plus Streaming is adaptive bit rate streaming solutions, which means it works by detecting a user bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of the video stream accordingly. — Alfred Amoroso

Data matters. It's the very essence of what we care about. Personal data is not equivalent to a real person - it's much better. It takes no space, costs almost nothing to maintain, lasts forever, and is far easier to replicate and transport. Data is worth more than its weight in gold - certainly so, since data weighs nothing; it has no mass. Data about a person is not as valuable as the person, but since the data is so much cheaper to manage, it's a far better investment. Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, points out that a user's data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user's value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year. Data's value - its power, its meaning - is the very thing that also makes it sensitive. The more data, the more power. The more powerful the data, the more sensitive. So the tension we're feeling is unavoidable. — Eric Siegel

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension
and that is the sign-user himself ... The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. — Walker Percy

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality. — Marshall McLuhan

To the designer, great design is beautiful design. A significant amount of effort must be placed into making the product attractive. To the client, great design is effective. It must bring in customers and meet the goals put forth to the designer in the original brief. To the user, great design is functional. It's easy to read, easy to use and easy to get out of it what was promised Truly great design, then, is when these three perspectives are considered and implemented equally to create a final product that is beautiful, effective and functional. — Joshua Johnson

You're not user-friendly. You're too needy. You have no social currency. You're a freak. Without a normative side, you can't get in. That's it. Sorry. — Sarah Schulman

Once I got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you're playing an instrument that is really hard. — Jimmy Page

A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL. — Richard Mitchell

The brain chemistry that drives the addict to seek pleasure beyond the point of satiety is similar, whether the user favours Jack Daniels or Jack-in-the-Box. — Vera Tarman

Like most gunters, I voted to reelect Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton (again). There were no term limits, and those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade. — Ernest Cline

The true principle of taxation is the benefit principle - those who benefit from a government service should pay for it. It's also known as the 'user pay' principle. Every effort should be made to link the payment of taxes or fees to the cost associated with the government service. — Mark Skousen

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
— Richard Mitchell

A mobile device adds rich contextual sensors and is aware of the world around it. Context is now much more than knowing where you are in an interface - it is where you are in a densely rich real-world environment. No longer is it enough to present a "map" of archived, published information. No longer is it enough to simulate a virtual world. The mobile device must be able to sense where a user is and facilitate actions situated in an immediate, living moment of experience defined by real places and times, by real states of being. — Frank Bentley

You sense far more than you are conscious of. Whether you want to or not — Tor Norretranders

I think 'Disney Infinity' is exciting. It's hard to even call it a video game, because it's so different. What excites me about this is how it's going to put more and more of what happens in the game into the hands of the user; it's up to them. You can play it to where everything's laid out for you. — John Lasseter

Working with lots of old media clients, I've had a front-row seat on the ascension of new social players and the decline of traditional news outlets. And it's clear to me that old media has an awful lot to learn from social media, in particular in five key areas: relevance, distribution, velocity, monetization, and user experience. — Ryan Holmes

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet. — Dylan Thomas

was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments," he said later. After seeing what Xerox called a graphical user interface (sometimes pronounced — Karen Blumenthal

The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver. — Walker Percy

Every time you make the user make a decision they don't care about, you have failed as a designer. — Aza Raskin

Women have their own strengths, like fashion. In technology, we can contribute in a big way in terms of the design of the user interface. — Weili Dai

You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. — Tim Cook

Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. — Richard Stallman

The FCC banned throttling for good reason, namely that Internet service providers should not bias their networks toward some applications or classes of applications. Biasing the network interferes with user choice, innovation, decisions of application makers, and the competitive marketplace. — Marvin Ammori

The creative folks intuitively design what's best for the user, while data folks provide great insights. The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics. — Matthew Humphreys

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user, — William Morris

All of human literature could just be a user's guide to the multiverse! — Lev Grossman

User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies. — Nir Eyal

The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Health care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. Most health care costs are covered by third parties. And therefore, the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care. And there's no market forces involved with health care. — George W. Bush

If a technology is elegant, biodegradable, made from renewable materials and employs a minimum of muscular, water or wind energy, is responsive, beautiful in its way, and challenging to the user in that it develops the user's senses and strength - it may comport with nature. — Stephanie Mills

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has said that several foreign dignitaries personally spoke to him about creating a new Internet user fee to subsidize an international universal service fund at the expense of traditional end users. — Marsha Blackburn

The pace of change for entrepreneurs is rapidly accelerating, and the cost and risk of launching a new business and getting off the ground is just amazing. The ability to gain user feedback really quickly and adapt to what your consumers want is totally different with the web as it is now. But finding a new market, helping people and taking that original idea and turning it into a business is really exciting right now. — Matt Mickiewicz

At times i am so focused like i have been taken over by a remote controlled computer, although not user friendly. — Tina J. Richardson

'It's not you, it's me.'
'Oh God. That's exactly what my last three boyfriends said when they dumped me. Is it in the Y-Chromosome User's Manual or something?'
He grinned. 'On page five. But, you know, don't tell anyone I told you.' — Kim Fielding

For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see. — Eva Figes

Twenty-five percent of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user generated content and thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. — Erik Qualman

You know what's so cool about gaming? The whole collective consciousness thing! Like when you tap into your own knight in shinning armor, you're tapping into all knights in shinning armor. All these archetypes, you know, are we're all of them, and you have to learn to honour and acknowledge them inside you."
"Plus, you get to be people you're not."
"Um. True. And people you are. — Devin Grayson

The U.K. is already disadvantaged on the wholesale cost of energy, and then it puts taxes on it. Anybody who's an energy user is just going to disappear. — Jim Ratcliffe

If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a 'time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense. — Kedar Joshi

Twitter proved without a shadow of a doubt it is much more than a social network, but a user-defined infrastructure that can be harnessed to change lives and expectations, to share and enhance unique experiences and viewpoints. - Twitchhiker — Paul Smith

My basic rule is, if it could possibly come from the end user, it's not a run-time crash. But if it is my code to my code, I crash it as hard as possible - fail as early as possible. — Brad Fitzpatrick

We make every effort to bring the newest and most innovative technology to our enthusiastic customers, drawing on the best in the industry. Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies on the Snapdragon 810-powered Mi Note Pro provides us the ability to deliver more performance, features and user capabilities to a mobile device than ever before. — Lei Jun

We are pushing ahead as fast as we can for all audiences, whether for the business user, the child, or the digital music enthusiast. — Jim Allchin

If you are building a habit-forming product, write down the answers to these questions: What habits does your business model require? What problem are users turning to your product to solve? How do users currently solve that problem and why does it need a solution? How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product? What user behavior do you want to make into a habit? — Nir Eyal

Because of the way tech is changing, and becoming cheaper and user-friendly, it's becoming easier to make films cheaply, maintaining quality. — Lance Reddick

People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well. — Andy Hertzfeld

They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer. — Erik Naggum

I wanted to build a tool for my generation: people 20 to 40 who don't want to spend time balancing a checkbook or checking multiple financial institutions' websites. Mint does just that, giving comprehensive, quick insights into a user's finances from their computer, mobile phone and/or tablet. — Aaron Patzer

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience. — Aaron Levie

The brighter the software, the dimmer the user. — Nicholas Carr

We are extremely attractive to page companies, because we significantly increase their user base. — David Rose

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. — Donald A. Norman

Every cannabis user is a medical patient whether they know it or not — Dennis Peron

The gasoline tax is a user fee, but it does not fill enough of the need, and you want cars to be more efficient. — Kevin McCarthy

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user. — Mitch Kapor

The iPod is a perfect example of Steve [Jobs]' methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system. — John Sculley

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it. — Christopher Hitchens

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour. — Jeffrey Zeldman

I think challenge for Facebook is to develop a culture that has the advertiser and the ad service be as strong a part of their culture as the user obsession is. — Jason Kilar

From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request. — Pharrell Williams

the book of 944 design guidelines for text-based user interfaces of bygone days that Smith and Mosier of Mitre Corporation developed for the U.S. Air Force (Mosier & Smith, 1986; Smith & Mosier, 1986). — Rex Hartson

At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation. — Aaron Patzer

Today Facebook went public, just as Myspace's last user went private. — Conan O'Brien

Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'. — Linus Torvalds

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful. — Fred Wilson

Google controls two-thirds of the US search market. Almost three-quarters of all Internet users have Facebook accounts. Amazon controls about 30% of the US book market, and 70% of the e-book market. Comcast owns about 25% of the US broadband market. These companies have enormous power and control over us simply because of their economic position. They all collect and use our data to increase their market dominance and profitability. When eBay first started, it was easy for buyers and sellers to communicate outside of the eBay system because people's e-mail addresses were largely public. In 2001, eBay started hiding e-mail addresses; in 2011, it banned e-mail addresses and links in listings; and in 2012, it banned them from user-to-user communications. All of these moves served to position eBay as a powerful intermediary by making it harder for buyers and sellers to take a relationship established inside of eBay and move it outside of eBay. — Bruce Schneier

The selection of MediLab came after an extensive evaluation process. The laboratory in Zambia presented many challenges such as rapidly expanding services and capacity, the need to coordinate laboratory services for 16 and soon to be 24 clinics in the Lusaka district alone, the need to automate recording and dissemination of results and the need for a robust, expandable, user friendly and technically supported LIMS system. The technology and international experience of MediSolution made MediLab an obvious choice. — Craig Wilson

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him? — Tom Clancy

Cell phones have gotten so small, you can't tell who's a cell phone user and who's a schizophrenic. — Bob Newhart

We care not only how to make it work, but also how it should work for the user and how it should work under the covers. This is craftsmanship. — Anonymous

Another power I don't have," said Lissa ruefully.
I grinned. "Hey, I have yet to meet any spirit user who can throw a punch like you can. That was poetry in motion, Liss." She groaned. — Richelle Mead

Fast. Powerful. User-friendly. Now choose any two. — Eric Daniels

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. — Marshall McLuhan

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user. — Reid Hoffman

I wish I could tell you the recipe for figuring out who the target user is for your product and who your users should be, but ... there isn't a recipe. It comes down to think really hard and use your judgement to figure out who you're really building this for. — Emmett Shear

The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user — Eric S. Raymond

The way I see it, the difference between farmers and suburbanites is the difference in the way we feel about dirt. To them, the earth is something to be respected and preserved, but dirt gets no respect. A farmer likes dirt. Suburbanites like to get rid of it. Dirt is the working layer of earth, and dealing with dirt is as much a part of farm life as dealing with manure. Neither is user-friendly but both are necessary. — E.L. Konigsburg

There is critical mass with high-speed Internet connections, so video is a good user experience. And that means there can be critical mass for advertisers. — Jim C. Walton

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead. — Aaron Levie

User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world. — Michael Eisner