Best 82 quotes of Donald A. Norman on MyQuotes

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

A challenge to the designers of the world: Make signs unnecessary.

A good designer will actually design the company.

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

Am I an Apple bigot? No. I can critique their products and their customer service philosophy. But overall, they do better than any other player.

And to get real work experience, you need a job, and most jobs will require you to have had either real work experience or a graduate degree.

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.

As the technology matures, it becomes less and less relevant. The technology is taken for granted. Now, new customers enter the marketplace, customers who are not captivated by technology, but who instead want reliability, convenience, no fuss or bother, and low cost.

Attractive things work better.

Attractive things work better When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.

Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand.

Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.

Change the attitude toward errors. Think of an object's user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.

Complexity is acceptable as long as it is intelligible and necessary. We want to avoid needless complications.

Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

Everyday people are not very good designers.

Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions. Bad websites have horrible personalities and instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly. We need to design things-products, websites, services-to convey whatever personality and emotions are desired.

Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.

Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.

Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?

Having the best product means nothing if the people won't buy it.

How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come through.

Hypertext makes a virtue out of lack of organization, allowing ideas and thoughts to be juxtaposed at will. [...] The advent of hypertext is apt to make writing much more difficult, not easier. Good writing, that is.

I believe that robots should only have faces if they truly need them

I believe that the Apple Shuffle is an excellent compromise among the conflicting requirements of simplicity, elegance, size, battery life, and function

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

If you're more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking.

If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense - the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product's components.

I'm not a fan of technology . I'm a fan of pedagogy, of understanding how people learn and the most effective learning methods. But technology enables some exciting changes.

In design it is important to shoe the effect of an action. ... Feedback is critical.

In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.

Innocence lost is not easily regained. The designer simply cannot predict the problems people will have, the misinterpretations that will arise, and the errors that will get made.

In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive soft drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.

In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.

I prefer design by experts - by people who know what they are doing

Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that

I think a successful company is one where everybody owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But the goal when you are actually doing the work is to somehow forget what discipline group you are in and come together. So in that sense, nobody should own user experience; everybody should own it.

I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting.

It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people's lives.

It is relatively easy to design for the perfect cases, when everything goes right, or when all the information required is available in proper format

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

It was always amusing to be inside Apple and read what journalists said we were doing

I've been looking at the iPod- the Apple iPod. One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in

Knowing how people will use something is essential

Market segmentation s a natural result of the vast differences among people

No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service - from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That's systems thinking.

Only the most sophisticated of beings can lie and cheat, and get away with it.