Jeff Johnson > Quotes

“Tramp stamp. A tattoo in the center of a woman's lower back. Also referred to as a "California bumper sticker." The germans refer to this as "arschgeweih," which translates as "ass antler." Bravo!”
― Jeff Johnson, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink

“Crazy people can add character to a place. If the ambience in your bar is off, or your lobby has gone inexplicably stale, consider picking up a lunatic. They're not hard to come by, and the often work for free. A lot of tattoo shops have one. Larger places might find it handy to keep two or three around.”
― Jeff Johnson

“Some flavor of all of this would have remained undiscovered to me. If you try to observe the world for long enough through the perfect lens, then one day it will surely settle permanently into place, and then every object is a still life. You live in the moments between blinks.”
― Jeff Johnson, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink

“Software developers come mainly from engineering and don’t see how similar their industry has become to the one that produces magazines, newspapers, books, TV shows, and movies. Most software developers haven’t yet learned to develop and follow strict standards for layout and graphic design and to pay as much attention to detail as traditional publishers and media studios do. As a result, graphic design and layout bloopers often get a “Who cares? It looks OK to me!” reaction from developers.”
― Jeff Johnson, GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and DOS

“0.1 second: This is the limit for perception of cause-and-effect between events. If software waits longer than 0.1 second to show a response to your action, cause-and-effect is broken: the software’s reaction will not seem to be a result of your action. Therefore, on-screen buttons have 0.1 second to show they’ve been clicked; otherwise users will click again. If an object the user is “dragging” lags more than 0.1 second behind the cursor, users will have trouble placing it. This 0.1-second deadline is what HCI researcher Stuart Card calls the perceptual “moment.” It is also close to the limit for perception of smooth animation: 0.063 second/frame (16 frames/second)”
― Jeff Johnson, GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and DOS

“Over the past four decades, much evidence has accumulated suggesting that responsiveness — a software application’s ability to keep up with users and not make them wait — is the most important factor in determining user satisfaction. Not just one of the most important factors - the most important factor.”
― Jeff Johnson, GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and DOS

“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.”
― Jeff Johnson, GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and DOS

“There is very little that is natural left in people when they stray from the cities. Day hiking in Gore-Tex with a bag of trail mix and a cell phone in a fanny pack and a bottle of iced chai tea clipped to your belt isn’t actually natural, it’s tourism, or worse, voyeurism.”
― Jeff Johnson, Everything Under the Moon

“Usability testing is useful, necessary, and inefficient.”
― Jeff Johnson, Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules

“Engineering does not replace art in a design, it makes it possible.”
― Jeff Johnson, Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules

“The perfect plan was the kind that had every chance of success, but if it fell apart it had the potential to explode and create a beautiful chaos to navigate at speed, and that was generally the secret goal all along.”
― Jeff Johnson, Lucky Supreme

“Loving books is a good thing. A solid thing. Having a big collection of good ones is important, or at least it seemed that way on every single day until you moved, and then it seemed like one of the worst ideas you ever had.”
― Jeff Johnson, A Long Crazy Burn

“Consider Microsoft Word. Until the mid-1990s, repaginating a document was a foreground task. You had to invoke the Repaginate command and then wait many seconds—for long documents, minutes—for it to complete before you could return to editing the document.”
― Jeff Johnson, GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and Dos

“Half of what is labeled ‘crime’ is something else. You be your own judge. Your own boss. The world is broken and you won’t fix it by obeying the broken rules.”
― Jeff Johnson, The Animals After Midnight

“If you try to observe the world for long enough through the perfect lens, then one day it will surely settle permanently into place, and then every object is a still life. You live in the moments between blinks.”
― Jeff Johnson, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink

“Brave is a mental illness you get when you’re desperate. Sometimes it lasts for less than a minute. Sometimes it sticks with you forever, like leprosy or TB. It all depends on how many times you have to carry the condition around in your head.”
― Jeff Johnson, Lucky Supreme

“If being any kind of hero falls all the way down to men like you, then we have already lost.”
― Jeff Johnson, A Long Crazy Burn

“What goals do users want to achieve by using the application? What set of human tasks is the application intended to support? Which tasks are common, and which ones are rare? Which tasks are most important, and which ones are least important? What are the steps of each task? What are the result and output of each task? Where does the information for each task come from? How is the information that results from each task used? Which people do which tasks? What tools are used to do each task? What problems do people have performing each task? What sorts of mistakes are common? What causes them? How damaging are mistakes? What terminology do people who do these tasks use? What communication with other people is required to do the tasks?”
― Jeff Johnson, Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules

“This has the benefit of originality,” I said. “I agree. Keep them off balance. Hurl crazy hookers at the enemy at every opportunity. Sun Tzu said that, didn’t he?” “I believe he did.”
― Jeff Johnson, Lucky Supreme

“I’m going to use music to explain this. It’s the difference between, say, Clapton and Hendrix. You listen and you wait for the moment you hear something masterful in Clapton, how close he can get to the edge of soulful fury without losing control. It’s that moment when we measure the guy. Lacking in the end and probably only popular because he was white. Hendrix was of course black, and he had weird hair on top of it. But when you listened, there it was, a controlled raging beauty, precision deep soul fury navigation at its finest. He was like an astronaut flying with no computer and a blindfold through the fire part of reentry. Functional, genius-level insanity. It wasn’t instinct. It was something else entirely, something so rare there isn’t even a word for it.”
― Jeff Johnson, Lucky Supreme