Joe Gebbia Quotes

Things that are ultimately complex must have a simple end user experience if they are to be successful.

Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible.

We've tried to simplify the site because some people found it too difficult to use and were intimidated by it.

I feel that it's lovely when, as a user, you're not aware of the complexity.

Consumers have zero time for products that are not simple, intuitive, and attractive to use. This is especially true with Internet products, where clean and useful design is a prerequisite to keeping anyone on your site for more than 30 seconds.

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.

Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

Good design to me is both appearance and functionality together. It's the experience that makes it good design.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

We want the average person to use it and think that it makes the experience of using Pinterest better.

OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.

Keeping it simple for the consumer is incredibly dire.

I'm not a tech guy. I'm looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people's eyes.

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.

I am always looking for ways to move technology away from being over-featured. Moving to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s meant I grew up as a designer in an environment where technology is a tool and not a means to an end. I believe that design should be driven by ideas, not style.

We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable, that leave you with the sense that that's the only possible solution that makes sense.

I love the idea of web design that maximises expressiveness over functionality.

Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.

One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface.

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.