Linus Torvalds Quotes

Great design... you won't have a business today without great design.

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

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

As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.

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

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.

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.

Design should be easy in the sense that every step should be obviously and clearly identifiable. Simplify elements to make change simple so you can manage the technical risk.

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

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

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

We care less about situations that are complex, difficult to tell and difficult to understand.

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

What I hope is, over time, users should not have to read a training manual. They should say, 'I totally get the Workday iPad app, because it runs the way my consumer apps run.'

I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.

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

I have my team focused on the front end, working on the user experience, and making sure we have all the wiki-like tools people need to work on the site. We're just cranking away.

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?

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

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

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

When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed.

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.