Ted Nelson Quotes

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

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

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

Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

Keeping it simple for the consumer is incredibly dire.

A world-changing vision often necessitates a profound simplicity in the user experience.

Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.

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

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

Simplicity is simple. Perhaps this sounds redundant. But it's true, and it's important.

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

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can't imagine any other way.

The best things - when I really feel that I'm communicating, and when I really feel that people are getting it - are simple, straightforward recipes. I think simple is the hardest to achieve because you don't have all those elements to hide behind.

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

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.

The K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle was pounded into my head in school and I still follow it today in most of my designs. I know that my most successful efforts are the simplest. I always find myself trying to subtract detail from design concepts in an attempt to distill the idea down to the most basic communication tool.

Often I forget that design is really about removing things: optimizing the flow of information, the display, so there are the fewest elements possible, but still they preserve the essence of the subject.

Above all, keep it simple.

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.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

Things that are complex are not useful, Things that are useful are simple.

Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.

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