Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

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.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

There are already a lot of devices in our lives that have rich text or the ability to handle graphics. Our devices are designed to be understood in less than a quarter of a second.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

One problem we discovered, for example, was that our "create a new account" button was in the wrong place...By simply moving it to the left side, mirroring the way people read, we saw a huge improvement in the way people used the site.

When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design.

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

CSS is the design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be, and it can be confusing, especially if you are new to it.

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

I was a user experience designer for Google Docs.

We want to continue to explore new possibilities regarding interface and interaction. We experiment different solutions to make interface an important component for immersion rather than just a remote control.

Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

A well-designed and humane interface does not have to be split into beginner and expert subsystems.

Good design makes a product understandable.

I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency?

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.

Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them.

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

Multi-touch sensing was designed to allow nontechies to do masterful things while allowing power users to be even more virtuosic.

In designing hardware to be used every day, it was important to keep both the human aspects and the machine in mind. What looks good also often feels good.