Usability Quotes

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

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

Don't make me think ~ Steve Krug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay attention to what users do, not what they say. ~ Jakob Nielsen

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

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