Quotes About Usability

Usability testing is useful, necessary, and inefficient.

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.

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.

The site had to be simple, fast, and intuitive.

The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable — not to ensure that the house is made of bricks.

One of my colleagues in the cellular-telephone business was complaining about how the engineers had made cell phones hard to use by packing in so many rarely used features. She said that cell phones were wet dogs. When I inquired about her metaphor, she explained, You have to really love a wet dog a lot to want to carry it around.

Infinite scrolling should never be employed for interfaces in which users need to get to the end of the list quickly, or need to return to a particular list item after navigating elsewhere.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

Any time you see signs or labels added to a device, it is an indication of bad design: a simple lock should not require instructions.

Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.

What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

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.

Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

Also note that invariably when we design something that can be used by those with disabilities, we often make it better for everyone.

All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it's not intuitive and if the end user can't use it.

The Joel Test 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you have a bug database? 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 7. Do you have a spec? 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? 10. Do you have testers? 11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? 12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

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.

When you're designing for extremes with software, the three most important "extremes" to remember are: 1. Design for people who can't read. 2. Design for people who can't use a mouse. 3. Design for people who have such bad memories they would forget their own name if it weren't embossed on their American Express

one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn't mean it's good for humanity.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.