UX design quotes you can cite with confidence, from Herbert Simon to Dieter Rams, and famous ones, from Henry Ford to Einstein, to keep off your slides.
Good UX design quotes compress a whole lesson into a sentence, but many of the ones designers share were never said by the person they're credited to. We've collected thirty and traced each to its first source: the book, article or interview, and the year. They follow the path of any project: understand people first, then simplify the solution, then make the case for design in the organisation and for every user's right to it. Under each quote is a line on when it helps your team. At the end are seven famous quotes we couldn't source, or that were pinned on the wrong person.
What have experts said about understanding users?
Good design starts before the first screen, when the team understands who will use the service and what they are trying to get done.
1. "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."
Herbert Simon, Nobel-winning economist and computer scientist, The Sciences of the Artificial (1969).
When it helps: when someone on the team thinks design belongs to designers alone. The product manager ranking priorities is designing. So is the analyst rewriting a procedure.
2. "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
Herbert Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" (1971).
When it helps: when every piece of information lands on the first screen. Each extra line takes attention from what matters to the user.
3. "To design the best UX, pay attention to what users do, not what they say."
Jakob Nielsen, "First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users" (2001).
When it helps: before you act on a comment from a survey or a meeting. Ask for one observation session before you change the screen.
4. "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
Steve Jobs, interview in BusinessWeek (1998).
When it helps: when the team plans to ask users what they want before there's anything to show them. It completes Nielsen's point rather than contradicting it: don't ask people for the solution; show them a prototype and watch what they do with it.
5. "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."
Steve Jobs, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (1997).
When it helps: when the plan opens by choosing a platform or a tool before anyone knows what users will do with it.
6. "As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product."
Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project at Apple, The Humane Interface (2000).
When it helps: when the plan treats the interface as a final coat of paint once the system is built. Customers don't see the system. They see the interface.
7. "Users spend most of their time on other sites."
Jakob Nielsen, the law he formulated in 2000 that now carries his name.
When it helps: when someone proposes an "innovative" navigation pattern unlike anything people know. What they're used to elsewhere, they expect from you.
8. "In design, 'intuitive' is a synonym for 'matches the user's mental model.'"
Erika Hall, Just Enough Research (2013).
When it helps: when someone calls their design intuitive. The right question is: intuitive to whom, and based on what expectation?
9. "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."
Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973).
When it helps: when user research and marketing work apart. Both teams are looking for the same thing.
10. "When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed."
Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (1955).
When it helps: when you map a user journey. Look for the friction before you look for new ideas.
Watch what people do before you ask them what they want.
What do experts mean by simplicity in design?
Simplicity doesn't mean deleting things at random. It means people reach what they came for without stopping to think. These quotes help a team defend simplicity when the requests for more features pile up.
11. "It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Steve Jobs, speaking to Rob Walker for The New York Times Magazine (2003).
When it helps: when a design review drifts into colours and corner radii. Bring it back to one question: does the user finish the task faster?
12. "Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding."
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, revised edition (2013).
When it helps: as a quick test for any screen. Can people tell what they can do here? Do they understand what each control will do before they press it?
13. "If an error is possible, someone will make it."
Don Norman, in the same book.
When it helps: when a user gets blamed for a mistake in a form. Design the field so the mistake is hard to make and easy to fix.
14. "It doesn't matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice."
Steve Krug, his second law of usability, in Don't Make Me Think (2000).
When it helps: when someone insists on "three clicks" at any cost. Clear steps matter more than few steps.
15. "Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left."
Steve Krug, his third law of usability, in the same book.
When it helps: before you sign off any interface copy. People scan pages; they don't read them word by word.
16. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and writer, Terre des hommes (1939), translated from the French.
When it helps: before any release. Ask of every element on the screen: what would people lose if we removed it?
17. "Good design is as little design as possible."
Dieter Rams, the tenth of his ten principles for good design, written in the late 1970s.
When it helps: when ornament and motion pile up on a service people want to finish and leave.
18. "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."
John Maeda, the tenth law in The Laws of Simplicity (2006).
When it helps: when simplifying is taken to mean only deleting. Sometimes one line of explanation in the right place makes a screen simpler.
19. "Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."
Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (1990).
When it helps: when a dashboard is called busy "because there's a lot of data". A lot of data is no excuse for data that's hard to read.
20. "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992).
When it helps: when someone on the team says "nobody will do that". Somebody will, so test the cases you didn't expect.
21. "The most profound technologies are those that disappear."
Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the 21st Century", Scientific American (1991).
When it helps: when a service's success is measured by how many features show. The best service is the one people use to get things done without thinking about it.
Simplicity starts with one task: decide which task most people come to do, make it the first thing they see, move the rest one level deeper, and delete what nobody would miss. Then measure simplicity by what people do, not by how many elements are on the page: can users finish the main task without help, and where do they stumble?
Where does design sit in the organisation, and which quotes don't hold up?
Design sometimes needs someone to explain it to leadership and to stand up for every user's right to it. These nine quotes help you do that.
22. "One could describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose."
Charles Eames, answering "What is your definition of design?" in the Q&A that became the 1972 film Design Q&A.
When it helps: when a design discussion starts with tools. Start with the purpose, then arrange the elements for it.
23. "Design depends largely on constraints."
Charles Eames, in the same Q&A.
When it helps: when the team sees the budget, the legacy systems or the regulations as obstacles. Constraints are what give the solution its shape.
24. "Design is the rendering of intent."
Jared Spool, "Design is the Rendering of Intent" (2013).
When it helps: when the team's decisions pull in different directions. Agree first on what you want to happen for the user, then design to make it happen.
25. "Getting the design right and the right design."
Bill Buxton, the subtitle of Sketching User Experiences (2007).
When it helps: when the team polishes one idea before trying any alternatives. Sketch several quick directions first.
26. "Good design is good business."
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the title of his 1973 lecture at the Wharton School, after his years leading IBM.
When it helps: when design shows up in the budget as a cost line. Tie each improvement to something you can measure: more completed applications, fewer support calls.
27. "Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success."
Tim Brown, the definition that spread after his 2008 Harvard Business Review article.
When it helps: when design thinking gets reduced to a sticky-note workshop. The definition puts business and technology beside people, not after them.
28. "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, in W3C's announcement of its Web Accessibility Initiative office (1997).
When it helps: when accessibility gets pushed to "a later phase". Our article on accessibility in design has practical first steps.
29. "Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design."
Ron Mace, the architect who coined the term universal design in the 1980s. The definition is from The Principles of Universal Design (1997), which he compiled with colleagues at NC State's Center for Universal Design.
When it helps: when someone plans a "special" version for people with disabilities. Design one version that works for everyone.
30. "Solve for one, extend to many."
One of the three principles of Microsoft's Inclusive Design toolkit (2016), whose development Kat Holmes led.
When it helps: when the team thinks accessibility work serves only a few people. An interface designed for someone using one hand also helps someone carrying a child or a bag.
Seven famous quotes that don't hold up
Three that the person credited never said:
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" is credited to Leonardo da Vinci, but researchers haven't found it in his writing. The earliest known version, in different words, is in Clare Boothe Luce's 1931 novel Stuffed Shirts, according to Quote Investigator.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" is credited to Henry Ford. The earliest known source that links it to him is from 1999, 52 years after he died.
"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is credited to Peter Drucker. The Drucker Institute itself says he never said it; his view of measurement was far more careful.
Four we couldn't trace to a reliable source:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" is credited to Albert Einstein. The closest thing he actually said is a differently worded sentence in a 1933 lecture at Oxford.
"The details are not the details. They make the design" is credited to Charles Eames, and the idea is his. The Eames script for the 1961 film ECS says "The details are not details", and adds that it is the details that "give the product its life". We found no source for the ending "They make the design".
"If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design" is credited to Ralf Speth, former CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. We found no speech or interview that confirms it.
"Good design, when it's done well, becomes invisible. It's only when it's done poorly that we notice it" is credited to Jared Spool. We couldn't find it in this wording in his articles, though he has written about the idea.
Some of these ideas are sound. Crediting them to the wrong person weakens your argument with the first person who checks.
How to use the verified quotes with your team
Pick one quote for each design review and ask: where does our screen go against it? One question like that opens a deeper discussion than a long list of comments. And when you need someone to review your product through its users' eyes, talk to our team.
