Jakob Nielsen Quotes about Design

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

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.

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

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

Users are not designers.

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.

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.