Jakob Nielsen Quotes
-
In the attention economy, anyone trying to connect with an audience must treat the user's time as the ultimate resource.
→ -
Windows '98 is so similar to Windows '95 because Apple hasn't invented anything worth copying since 1995.
→ -
To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.
→ -
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience.
→ -
On the Internet, it's survival of the easiest.... Give users a good experience and they're apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But ... it's easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around.
→ -
What we learned is money doesn't grow on trees.
→ -
People have to want to change before there's any chance of helping them do so.
→ -
Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
→ -
Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.
→ -
Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company's profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy.
→ -
On the Web, all advantages are temporary, and you must keep innovating to stay ahead
→ -
The best Web sites are better than Reality.
→ -
On average, when you ask someone to perform a task on a site, they cannot do it. It's not their fault; it's the designer's fault.
→ -
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?
→ -
Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it.
→ -
Compared to 1999...we cannot quite declare victory, but we can declare progress.
→ -
Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones.
→ -
At most project meetings, everyone has a seat at the table except the poor victims who will have to operate the technology.
→ -
...pay attention to what users do, not what they say.
→ -
The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
→ -
A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.
→ -
Information Overload = "information pollution"
→ -
The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web.
→ -
Three Tips: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.
→ -
Diversity is power on the Web. Big sites may be bigger, but smaller sites will keep scoring higher for specialized topics, both in terms of their connections with users and in terms of each visit's commercial value.
→ -
Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.
→ -
The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it.
→ -
Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.
→ -
If your users have many questions, it's a failure of your primary site design. It becomes not so much customer support, as much as customer complaints.
→ -
Ultimately, users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop.
→
Related Authors
-
-
Erich Gamma Author -
Edward Tufte Statistician -
Bill Buxton Researcher -
-
Ben Shneiderman Computer Scientist -
Grady Booch Software Engineer -
Alan Cooper Software programmer -
Alan Kay Computer Scientist -
Jesse James Garrett Designer -
Bill Moggridge Designer -
Donald A. Norman Author -
Jonathan Ive Designer -
Fred Brooks Software Engineer -
J. M. Coetzee Novelist -
-
Tom Gilb Engineer -
Jeffrey Zeldman Web Designer -
Watts Humphrey Software Engineer -
Jef Raskin Computer Scientist