Jane Jacobs Quotes

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era - it's a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I'm working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I've dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions - and I'm trying to be a better, more attentive listener.

I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

Reducing a product's definition to a list of features and functions ignores the real opportunity - orchestrating technological capability to serve human needs and goals.

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.

Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.

Design negotiates between technology, policy, systems, and users.

The nature of design is to synthesize disparate perspectives and create a richer end product through collaboration and iteration.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.

My mantra is: 'Good design accelerates the adoption of new ideas.'

Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.