Quotes About Functionality

The universe seems to be a lot like a car or a computer, in that it's designed to be user-friendly, which doesn't necessarily require the user to have a clue what's going on under the hood.

Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway.

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.

Design Is a Big Word

Design is based upon resolving how someone is going to use something. Great design is describing the very best experience for them, then moving towards that ideal.

Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.

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.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

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.

There's a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.

Design, vitalized and simplified, will make the comforts of civilized life available to an ever-increasing number of Americans.

I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs - that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.

Remember, the web isn't about control. If a visitor to your site is familiar with using a browser's native form doodad, you won't be doing them any favors if you override the browser functionality with your own widget, even if you think your widget looks better.

Good clothes are good clothes, and they don't need whales and tricks and too many jokes. Sometimes you just need something to wear.

My wheelchair is like the Cadillac of wheelchairs; it goes up and down and back, and I can lay down in it.

Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.

Is there some situation where square wheels would be better than round wheels? Sure! A round wheel has a pressure point directly under the tire. A square wheel's corners are going to bite and propel you forward. The square wheel could be superior on snow or mud or sand.

A movie, it's like a very complicated timepiece. There's a lot of wheels in a watch. And some of those wheels, if they don't turn right, then, you know, the watch ain't gonna tell the time.

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product.

When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.