the illustrious speak

‘Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is “on paper”.’

Alan Cooper, ‘father of Visual Basic’

‘Usability is critical for any application, but for mass‑market software, usability spells success or failure more clearly than any other feature.’

Dr. Jerrold Grochow, chief technology officer, American Management Systems

‘Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.’

‘A conceptually integrated system is faster to build and to test.’

‘To achieve conceptual integrity, a design must proceed from one mind or a small group of agreeing minds.’

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. in his book ‘The mythical man‑month’

‘For each dollar a company invests in developing the usability of a product, the company receives $10–$100 in benefits and wins customer satisfaction and continued business. Furthermore, industry data shows that for each dollar spent to fix a problem during product design, $10 are spent to fix the same problem in product development, and $100 or more are spent to fix the same problem after product release.’

Claire Marie Karat, ‘A business case approach to usability cost justification’ in: R. Bias and D. Mayhew, eds. Cost‑Justifying Usability, Academic Press, NY, 1994

‘You know you have achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.’

Antoine de Saint‑Exupery

‘The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.’

Roy Carlson

‘Usability cost–benefit data shows that including usability in product development actually cuts the time to market and increases sales because usability and ease of use build quality into products and catch many expensive problems early on in the cycle when they can be addressed at lower cost. Finally, working with users from the beginning of a product cycle ensures that the product is being designed so that users will be satisfied.’

Claire Marie Karat, ‘A business case approach to usability cost justification’ in: R. Bias and D. Mayhew, eds. Cost‑Justifying Usability, Academic Press, NY, 1994

‘We have already gone so far down the road of serving computers that we’ve come to accept our servitude as necessary. It isn’t. It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand: ‘Make our computers simpler to use!’ Make them talk to us, do things for us, get the information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Only then will computers make us productive and truly serve us, instead of the other way around.’

Michael L. Dertouzos, Director, MIT laboratory for computer science, in his book ‘The unfinished revolution’

‘Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use.’

Forrester Research

‘The old days when we could just go into the back room and develop technology for the DOD are gone. Now we’re developing technology for my mother, and that requires a whole new set of skills.’

Peter Denning, George Mason University, computer science chairman

‘Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.’

Sir John Harvey‑Jones

‘To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grasp what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.’

Steve Jobs, Wired (March, 1996)