Rosa Boyd > Rosa's Quotes

“Principles of design:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“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.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible
signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Question everything. I am particularly fond of “stupid” questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“The aesthetic-usability effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs—whether they are or not.”
― William Lidwell, Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings