Quotes About Usability

Figure 1-3. The User Experience Honeycomb. Along

No constitution is or can be perfectly symmetrical, what it can and must be is generally accepted as both fair and usable.

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.'

The observers — members of Microsoft's User Research Group — diligently note each click, key press, and hesitation, hoping they'll learn the answer to the industry's big secret: why do so many people find computers difficult to use?

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

Usability's strength is in identifying problems, while design's strength is in identifying solutions.

The real interaction designer's decisions are based on what the user is trying to achieve.

You can predict which features in any new technology will be used and which won't. The use of a feature is inversely proportional to the amount of interaction needed to control

Product successes and failures have shown repeatedly that users don't care that much about features. Users only care about achieving their goals.

Interaction design isn't merely a matter of aesthetic choice; rather, it is based on an understanding of users and cognitive principles.

Computer literacy, however, is really a euphemism for forcing human beings to stretch their thinking to understand the inner workings of application logic, rather than having software-enabled products stretch to meet people's usual ways of thinking.

Many developers and usability professionals still approach interface design by asking what the tasks are. Although this may get the job done, it won't produce much more than an incremental improvement: It won't provide a solution that differentiates your product in the market, and very often it won't really satisfy the user.

When we make something hard to use, people get upset. They become so angry that they want to destroy it. We don't want to create things that people will want to destroy

Everyday people are not very good designers.

When creating great experiences, it's not so much about doing what users expect. Instead, it's about creating a design that clearly meets their needs at the instant they need it.

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.

Because you cannot speak to unknown clients, there are only two solutions: either find your users and do a usability study, or be use case oriented. Work with use cases—that is, visions of the API user's action—and then optimize specifically for these. Getting responses from users via a usability study is good and can verify that your expectations about the use cases are correct.

We will continue to work with agencies across the government to unleash the power of open data and to make government data more accessible and usable for entrepreneurs, companies, researchers, and citizens everywhere - innovators who can leverage these resources to benefit Americans in a rapidly growing array of exciting and powerful ways.

Never present a power-user option in such a way that normal users must learn all about it in order to know they don't need to use it.

People shouldn't really have to think about an object when they are using it. Not having to think about it makes the relationship between a person and an object run more smoothly.

Fundamentally, all UX research answers one of two questions: (a) Who are our users and what are they trying to do? (b) Can people use the thing we've designed to solve their problem? You answer the first question with a field visit and you answer the second question with a usability test.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first then implement to the interface design.

the ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

Noneditable data should never be displayed in a control that looks editable or operable. Checkboxes, radio buttons, menus, sliders, and the like should never be used for noneditable data because they look operable. Even if they are inactive (grayed), they look like they can somehow be made active, and users will waste time trying to do so.