User Interface Quotes

It's often the case that teams working in agile processes do not actually go back to improve the user interface of the software. But, as the saying goes, "it's not iterative if you only do it once." Teams need to make a commitment to continuous improvement, and that means not simply refactoring code and addressing technical debt but also reworking and improving user interfaces. Teams must embrace the concept of UX debt and make a commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience. ~ Jeff Gothelf

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would. ~ Joel Spolsky

User interface is customer service for the computer. ~ Julie Larson-Green

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic. ~ Brian Behlendorf

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

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. ~ Neal Stephenson

The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old. ~ Thorsten Heins

Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, " Did you think of this? " said Fadell. " And then we'd all go, " Holy Shit." He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away. ~ Walter Isaacson

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface. ~ Jeff Bezos

In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary. ~ Linus Torvalds

You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness. It seems reasonable to assume that relevance of results is the most important factor: blindingly fast, useless answers do not make a user happy. However, user perceptions do not always coincide with system designers' notions of quality. For example, user happiness commonly depends very strongly on user interface design issues, including the layout, clarity, and responsiveness of the user interface, which are independent of the quality of the results returned. ~ Christopher D. Manning

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces. ~ Daniel J. Bernstein

Yonomi Yonomi rules are called "routines". I really like the user interface on the Yonomi app. As Yonomi is dedicated to automation on smart devices, they propose some specific services. When you signup, you can launch a discovery of your devices. It is way easier than checking each device available on the Yonomi platform to see if there is one you own. One of the other advantages of Yonomi was the ability to have several actions linked to one trigger but IFTTT recently did an update to propose the same features. Yonomi will have a simpler way to trigger routines than IFTTT. Because they have an Alexa skill, they let you use queries such as "Alexa, turn on [routines name]" or "Alexa, turn off [routines name]" which feels more natural than the trigger keyword from IFTTT. ~ Quentin Delaoutre

All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it. ~ Jon Postel

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 closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions. ~ Francois-Henri Pinault

It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. ~ Steve Jobs

Pinterest is offering consumers a way to discover things on the web, in a serendipitous way, with a beautiful user interface. So it's offering a whole new paradigm called 'discover' and allowing users to be creative. ~ Ron Conway

User interface is the process of shifting from chaotic complexity to elegant simplicity. ~ Akshat Paul

I like to see photographs: I like to see my family. To me, when I open a basic browser, and it's that very elegant silver simple user interface, I am unhappy. I don't need elegant and silver and simple! ~ Mitchell Baker

Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. ~ Bill Gates

Make interfaces programmatic rather than semantic when possible. Each interface consists of a programmatic part and a semantic part. The programmatic part consists of the data types and other attributes of the interface that can be enforced by the compiler. The semantic part of the interface consists of the assumptions about how the interface will be used, which cannot be enforced by the compiler. The semantic interface includes considerations such as "RoutineA must be called before RoutineB" or "RoutineA will crash if dataMember1 isn't initialized before it's passed to RoutineA." The semantic interface should be documented in comments, but try to keep interfaces minimally dependent on documentation. Any aspect of an interface that can't be enforced by the compiler is an aspect that's likely to be misused. Look for ways to convert semantic interface elements to programmatic interface elements by using Asserts or other techniques. ~ Steve McConnell

The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers. ~ Jim Highsmith

Since birth control roots in a species of selfishness, the spiritual life of the user of contraceptives is also weakened. Women seem to become more masculine in thought and action; men more callous and reserved; both husband and wife become more careless of each other, and increasingly indifferent to the higher duties and joys of living. ~ John Andreas Widtsoe

Always drink at least 8 ounces of water or a sugar-free decaffeinated beverage with every meal or snack. If you are a heavy caffeine user, gradually reduce caffeine intake to zero whenever possible. ~ Barry Sears

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool. ~ Peter Drucker

If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city. ~ Erik Naggum

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. ~ Ken Thompson

I believe that any sort of changes to interface that allows people to get into games and enjoy games is a great trend. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

Holy symbols like crosses and blessed water occasionally have an effect, but are dependent upon the personal faith of the user. Most Hunters opt for violence over faith; we're kind of like soccer fans that way. ~ Larry Correia

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program. ~ Mitch Kapor

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. ~ Dan Simmons

The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies are those that are in harmony with users' needs. They must support relationships and activities that enrich the users' experiences. ~ Ben Shneiderman

[The] dynamics of computational artifacts extend beyond the interface narrowly defined, to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities. System design, it follows, must include not only the design of innovative technologies, but their artful integration with the rest of the social and material world. ~ Lucy Suchman

In a deep sexy voice, she said Windows don't turn me on.
I raised an eyebrow at her, Mac user? ~ Diane Mott Davidson

This society is not 'user-friendly' for older people. ~ Ram Dass

You must accept that if the computer is a tool, it is the job of tool user to know what to use it for. ~ Peter Drucker

Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product. ~ Ellen Lupton

One of the cool things we're seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount - and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate. ~ Leah Busque

I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.

This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping".

I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In ~ John C. Lilly

That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface. ~ Steven Johnson

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Every hour spent investigating a drug user or seller is an hour that could have been used to find a missing child. ~ Randy Barnett

Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance. ~ Garry Kasparov

I am extraordinarily fascinated by the future of technology. We are in the early infancy of technology, and we have an opportunity to guide how technology develops and integrates into our lives. I talk a lot about the 'invisible interface,' or the idea that we can utilize technology without being absorbed into a screen. ~ Yves Behar

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. ~ Richard Stallman

Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user. ~ Richard Stallman

Money is not good or evil. It has no morals or intentions on its own. Money reflects the character of the user. ~ Dave Ramsey

The designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important. ~ Donald Knuth

Is that the only way?" Tom asked her. "Vik and I tried net-sending with a thought interface during Programming once, but I couldn't concentrate on just one thing at a time."

Vik nodded. "His programming questions were always like, 'Vik, how do steak boobs function? ~ S.J. Kincaid

But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them. ~ Leonard Adleman

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

One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After history's first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten. ~ John Scalzi

I'm not massively into computers. I'm a fan of Macs because they're more user friendly, so I'm used to using them. ~ Matthew Kane

I think that building any product that has a lot of user loyalty is a bit like making a sequel to a great movie or video game - people generally want 'more of the same thing, except better and different.' ~ Yishan Wong

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

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

For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. ~ Nir Eyal

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended. ~ Raymond Loewy

Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him - do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there's an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anesthesiologist - do you talk to the anesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn't admit to being left handed - do you tell the judge what's going on? Imagine he's gay, and could not have committed the crime because he's gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn't a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay
just imagine that he is ~ Bernhard Schlink

You know what I'd really, really like? What I'd pay MONEY for? A ZX81 with a disc drive. I understood the ZX81. It was so easy to interface stuff to it. ~ Terry Pratchett

It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee. ~ Ken MacLeod

As a wheelchair user, you can't move about freely. That's the only thing that bothers me a little. When I'm in the Euro Group in Brussels, colleagues who want to talk to me have to come to me. But I hope they know that this has nothing to do with arrogance. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider. ~ David Naylor

If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring. Apple could put the entire text of "Mein Kampf" inside the iTunes user agreement, and you'd just go agree, agree, agree - what? - agree, agree. ~ John Oliver