Jakob Nielsen Quotes

...pay attention to what users do, not what they say.

Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.

Three Tips: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

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 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.

A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.

Designers are not users.

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.

Clear content, simple navigation and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it.

On the Web, all advantages are temporary, and you must keep innovating to stay ahead

Ultimately, users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop.

At most project meetings, everyone has a seat at the table except the poor victims who will have to operate the technology.

In the attention economy, anyone trying to connect with an audience must treat the user's time as the ultimate resource.

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.

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.

A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time.

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.

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.

Information Overload = "information pollution"

Users are not designers.

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline.