Steve Jobs Quotes

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. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

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

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

It's incredibly exciting to know people are using and living with the things I create.

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.

I love taking an idea... to a prototype and then to a product that millions of people use.

Our principal role as designers is to accelerate new ideas and the adoption of new ideas.

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.

I ended up going to do a matches program at the state for industrial design. And from there, I got hired at IDEO to joint their design team there - and basically, you are starting as an industrial designer to design products - and then kept asking the question, 'What else can design accomplish? What else can design do?'

Product design is fed by the avant-garde.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

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.

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.

Here's the thing about Apple, we complain and they give us more battery life. We complain and they'll give us more stuff. Everything's beta right now. Everything's experimental. They really don't know what people want.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.

Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.

Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

I'm a designer, and for me, things are always evolving, and such evolution is necessary.

We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple. But it is very much about designing and prototyping and making.