User Research Quotes

Never go into user research to prove a point, and never create goals that seek to justify a position or reinforce a perspective. The process should aim to uncover what people really want and how they really are, not whether an opinion (whether yours or a stakeholder's) is correct ~ Mike Kuniavsky

Working two part-time jobs and doing round-the-clock research was a snap compared to full-time motherhood, she said. ~ Diane Chamberlain

In the '70s, there were economists who argued that seat belts were causing people to drive faster and kill more pedestrians. But after 15 or 20 years of research, we can now conclude that's actually not true. Seat belts, on net, do make people safer. So, on an evidence-based process, we should have people wear seat belts. ~ Greg Ip

I have always focused on basic research, motivated by a desire to understand the world. ~ Jennifer Doudna

Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied. ~ Steven Pinker

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other. ~ Aldous Huxley

I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire. ~ Deborah Harkness

graphical user interfaces make
easy tasks easy, while command line interfaces make difficult tasks possible ~ William E. Shotts Jr.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way. ~ Gerard Way

Don't lose sight of user delight. ~ Mark Pincus

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past. ~ Brad Meltzer

Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men - Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research - and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition, and decomposition. ~ David Quammen

According to both scientific and anecdotal research, it is clear that homework should be the exception, not the rule. Even the most inventive or meaningful assignments still infringe on the time that belongs to families. ~ Vicki Abeles

...I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength of the feeling from which alone such work...can grow. What a deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for understanding, even if only of a meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of celestial mechanics....Only the man who devotes his life to such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being. ~ Albert Einstein

It is wrong to draw a sharp line in one's imagination between the "nature" present on the Rocky Mountain front and that available in the suburbanite's own front yard. The natural world found on even the most perfect and stylized of lawns is no less real than that at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Different, yes, but to draw too sharp a distinction between the sparsely settled world of Alaska and the dense suburbs of Levittown is a prescription for the plundering of natural resources. It is easy to see how the yard, conceived as less natural and thus less important than the spotted owl, is easily ignored. The point is underscored by research showing that, surprisingly, people who evince concern for the environment are more likely to use chemicals on their yards than those who are less ecologically aware. ~ Ted Steinberg

Junk food nurtures the spirit. I think there's scientific research to prove it. ~ Suzanne Johnson

The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Flexner's good intentions had laid the groundwork for the specialty- and research-dominated system of medical education that still stands- the more prestigious the school, the greater the emphasis on biomedical research and the less the emphasis on pragmatic medical care. ~ John Abramson

Prospective research looks forward in time to see how a group of individual change over time while retrospective research looks backward in time and attempts to reconstruct the conditions that led to the current situation. ~ Shelley E. Taylor

I'm not a method actor, but I'm a big research kind of actor. ~ Ruben Santiago-Hudson

I'm sometimes shocked by the way scientists huddle behind closed doors to discuss important research results without informing the public about them at all. Academic caution is often preferable to premature publication, but fear can also destroy opportunities. ~ Giulia Enders

The Segue Institute was the preeminent research organization for all things paranormal and it was housed in a haunted, renovated turn of-the-century hotel. The place was supposedly loaded with what the scientists there called Shadow, capital S, a scary word for magic. Dark magic. ~ Erin Kellison

Research tells us that we judge people in areas where we're vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we're doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people's choices. If I feel good about my body, I don't go around making fun of other people's weight or appearance. We're hard on each other because we're using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived shaming deficiency. ~ Brene Brown

If a lot of people feel like this company is undervalued and go out and buy the stock, the stock price will go up reflecting the higher value of this company. You might have information because you trade with them or because you've done some research on them. ~ Robert F. Engle

In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language. ~ Harry Markowitz

To overcome stress you have to find out something. You've got to do some research and homework. You need to find out who you are today. ~ Frederick Lenz

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov. ~ Rick Perlstein

Upgrade your user, not your product. Value is less about the stuff and more about the stuff the stuff enables. Don't build better cameras - build better photographers. ~ Kathy Sierra

Firearms, if you think about it, are power tools. They drill holes in things and chew things up. That's their purpose. The purpose of the user is, quite simply, to puncture and destroy the right things and not the wrong things. ~ Massad Ayoob

Enter Justine Putet, of whom it is now time to speak. Imagine a swarthy-looking, ill-tempered person, dried-up and of viperish disposition, with a bad complexion, an evil expression, a cruel tongue, defective internal economy, and (over all this) a layer of aggressive piety and loathsome suavity of speech. A paragon of virtue of a kind that filled you with dismay, for virtue in such a guise as this is detestable to behold, and in this instance it seemed to be inspired by a spirit of hatred and vengeance rather than by ordinary feelings of kindness. An energetic user of rosaries, a fervent petitioner at her prayers, but also an unbridled sower of calumny and clandestine panic. In a word, she was the scorpion of Clochemerle, but a scorpion disguised as a woman of genuine piety. ~ Gabriel Chevallier

I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton. ~ Mark Billingham

Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that. ~ Bill Maris

When I realized that my body had been damaged from adverse environmental exposures, I decided to use it for medical research and to develop the recovery techniques. ~ Steven Magee

My first real venture was a paintball company I started in Grade 10, when I was 16. After hearing about it from a friend, I realized my town didn't have a playing field. I did some research, spoke with other paintball company owners, and I started my own field the following summer. ~ Ryan Holmes

If colorblindness seems to backfire, is there something that does help our children - and us - navigate the dangerous shoals of race? Yes: talking openly about racial differences and what they might mean. Psychological research shows that cognitive biases in social judgment "can be controlled only through subsequent, deliberate 'mental correction' that takes group status squarely into account. ~ Ian F. Haney-Lopez

People with a scientific mindset are analytical, open-minded, flexible and have the capacity to answer questions. They are basically focused on what they do not know, and only exceptionally on what they do know. ~ Eraldo Banovac

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology. ~ James Rothman

Raises a fundamental question: are we also evolving genetically? Medical research, added to a deepening analysis of the three billion nucleotide letters of the human genome, has revealed that evolution is indeed still occurring ~ Edward O. Wilson

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research. ~ Richard Dawkins

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. ~ Roland Barthes