86 User Interface Quotes
Following is our list of user interface quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about user experience.
Quick Jump To
Famous User Interface Quotes
In many cases the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary. — Linus Torvalds
The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design. — Steven Johnson
A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures. — Ben Shneiderman
As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product. — Jef Raskin
A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time. — Jakob Nielsen
People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well. — Andy Hertzfeld
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. — Jakob Nielsen
A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about. — Douglas Adams
The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple. — Grady Booch
Design isn't crafting a beautiful, textured button with breathtaking animation. It's figuring out if there's a way to get rid of the button altogether. — Edward Tufte
An API that isn't comprehensible isn't usable. — James Gosling
Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail. — Jakob Nielsen
The trend of design toward simplicity and accessibility in software happened for a reason—simple sells, simple’s usable and simple scales. — Rand Fishkin
If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful. — Alan Cooper
Designers are not users. — Jakob Nielsen
Short User Interface Quotes
- Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs
- Design is thinking made visual. — Saul Bass
- A design isn't finished until someone is using it. — Brenda Laurel
- Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended. — Raymond Loewy
- ...pay attention to what users do, not what they say. — Jakob Nielsen
- If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. — Scott Adams
User Friendly Quotes
Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'... Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover. — Bill Gates
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude. — Douglas Coupland
I am intrigued enough to want to continue, and also to try and work with companies like Sony on modifying the cameras and making them more user-friendly and efficient. — Mike Figgis
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. — Niklas Zennstrom
Because of the way tech is changing, and becoming cheaper and user-friendly, it's becoming easier to make films cheaply, maintaining quality. — Lance Reddick
The polling of Internet users shows that friends recommendations are the most reliable driver behind purchasing decisions. Right now that market is largely untapped. Facebook and other social networks can allow that to happen. — Yuri Milner
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Once I got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you're playing an instrument that is really hard. — Jimmy Page
This society is not 'user-friendly' for older people. — Ram Dass
Microsoft has laid down the foundations for next-generation computing and is the founder in terms of providing user-friendly software - thereby increasing the number of novice users. — Arfa Karim
User Experience Quotes
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves — Steve Jobs
Google doesn’t care how much time and effort you put into your content. They care about the user experience. — Brian Dean
SEO success comes to marketers who strive for stellar content and an impeccable user experience. — Brian Dean
User Experience Signals are the new SEO. — Brian Dean
A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with. — Jesse James Garrett
Five years ago, the heroes were technologists. Today, the heroes are designers building out a user experience. You can have the most amazing technology in the world, but if it's not put in a form that's useful and desirable, you won't be successful. — Robert Brunner
My practical approach based on experience is to create a website for real Internet users, not for search engine spiders. — David Naylor
Website will not require me to point and click and drag and search. — Jensen Huang
Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. — Milton Friedman
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs
Interface Quotes
Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death. — Paul Stamets
If there's one thing that people fail to appreciate about the social justice movement where it interfaces with the academy is that just because what is being said is crazy to the point of absurdity does not mean that the strategic plan is absurd. — Bret Weinstein
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence. — Nam June Paik
First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard. — Bjarne Stroustrup
I'm interested in businesses that take digital bits and turn them into interfaces for physical atoms. I'm also interested in drones, Bitcoin, and 3D printing. — Balaji Srinivasan
Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'. — Linus Torvalds
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned. — Bruce Tognazzini
The ecologist has a much more comprehensive and holistic view of the world. We're looking at the natural environment as well as the human built environment and the connectivity between the two - how do the natural environment and the human-built environment interact and interface with each other. — Ken Yeang
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now. — Jon Kabat-Zinn
I dream of a Digital India where technology ensures the Citizen-Government interface is incorruptible. — Narendra Modi
People Writing About User Interface
More User Interface Quotes
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface. — Jeff Bezos
A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would. — Joel Spolsky
The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user. — Seth Godin
I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces. — Daniel J. Bernstein
It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. — Steve Jobs
I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it. — Steve Jobs
Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap. — Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. — Bill Gates
When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology. — Howard Rheingold
When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex. — Randall Munroe
The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant. — Bill Gates
I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions. — Francois-Henri Pinault
User interface is customer service for the computer. — Julie Larson-Green
All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it. — Jon Postel
We'll continue to expand our footprint... Oracle's Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers. — Larry Ellison
Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities. — Nathan Myhrvold
Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work. — Nicholas Negroponte
Women have their own strengths, like fashion. In technology, we can contribute in a big way in terms of the design of the user interface. — Weili Dai
Radically simplify the user interface, reinvent it, enough face lifts! You can put as much lipstick on a chicken as you want, it's never going to look good! — Philippe Kahn
They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer. — Erik Naggum
Unfortunately, nigh the whole world is now duped into thinking that silly fill-in forms on web pages is the way to do user interfaces. — Erik Naggum
The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message. — Marshall McLuhan
You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window. — Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old. — Thorsten Heins
History repeats itself again, I guess. The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don't innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old. — Thorsten Heins
The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being. — Sharon Lee
To the user, the interface is the product. — Aza Raskin
A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds. — Ted Nelson
It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly. — Douglas Coupland
The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users. — Douglas Rushkoff
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of user interface quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about user interface to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of user interface quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
Embed HTML Link
Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage