20 User Research and UX Quotes to Inspire You
In need of a little boost? We’ve assembled our favorite UX quotes for UXR advice, inspiration, stakeholder persuasion, and more.
In need of a little extra reminder that user research and UX are amazing and important work? We at Sharewell have assembled 20 quotes to get you and your team excited about UXR. There are quotes for the moments you need a little reminder that research is important work, to help convince stakeholders that research is the key to success, and to share the joy behind doing UX research work.
When you need a little reminder of what research and user experience can achieve
1. “There’s a big difference between making a simple product & making a product simple.”
Des Traynor, Co-Founder of Intercom
2. “Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but that’s where growth and forgiveness come in.”
Jeffrey Zeldman, Principal Designer at Automattic
3. “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”
Mark Twain, a writer
4. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
E. F. Schumacher, economist
5. “Usability plays a much wider role in our lives than most people realize. It’s not just about using a website, a piece of software, or the latest technology. Usability is about setting up a tent, relighting a furnace to heat a home, trying to figure out a tax form, or driving an unfamiliar rental car. Usability impacts everyone, every day. It cuts across cultures, age, gender, and economic class.”
Thomas Tullis, author of Measuring the User Experience and Beyond the Usability Lab, UXR consultant and speaker
When you want some advice from the UX greats
6. “Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Pioneer and Co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group
7. “The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity.”
Jon Bolt, UX Designer and writer
8. “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
Seth Godin, blogger, entrepreneur, and author
9. “People ignore design that ignores people.”
Frank Chimero, co-founder of Abstract, designer and writer
10. “The best kind of design isn’t necessarily an object, a space or a structure: it’s a process – dynamic and adaptable.”
Don Norman, co-founder and principal of Nielsen Norman Group, author of The Design of Everyday Things
11. “To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.”
Julie Zhou, former VP of Product Design at Facebook, author of The Making of a Manager
12. “When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as “SOME User Experience” or… SUX?”
Billy Gregory, Co-organizer of #AllyTO
13. “Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.”
Dana Chisnell, Senior Fellow, Project Redesign @ NCoC.org and Design Lead at California Office of Digital Innovation
14. “People should never feel like a failure when using technology. Like the customer, the user is always right. If software crashes, it is the software designer’s fault. if someone can’t find something on a website, it is the web designer’s fault… The big difference between good and bad designers is how they handle people struggling with their design. Technology serves humans. Humans do not serve technology.”
Joshua Porter, co-founder of Rocket Insights
15. “When we do a lot of user research, it’s easy to feel confident…But if you do user research well, you will always find something surprising. No matter how much research we do or how much time we spend with our customers, we can’t completely know them. And I feel like the goal of user research should be to find those moments.”
Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach and Founder of Producttalk.org
When you need to convince stakeholders research is the key to success
16. “‘Does it better’ will always beat ‘did it first.’”
Aaron Levie, CEO at Box
17. “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
Ralf Speth, CEO at Jaguar
18. “If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.”
Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
19. “If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likable person: respectful, generous and helpful.”
Alan Cooper, founder of Cooper
20. “If you don’t talk to your customers, how will you know how to talk to your customers?”
Will Evans, Account Lead at LeadingAgile
