Mike Davidson Quotes

I love the idea of web design that maximises expressiveness over functionality.

Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat.

Good design to me is both appearance and functionality together. It's the experience that makes it good design.

IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

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.

Websites are kind of useless. There's so much great web content and design out there, but the ways in which they are being experienced are not being maximized.

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.

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.

The Internet didn't become usable until Netscape because that gave the average person a user interface that was intuitive, simple, friendly - this made it accessible.

Consumers have zero time for products that are not simple, intuitive, and attractive to use. This is especially true with Internet products, where clean and useful design is a prerequisite to keeping anyone on your site for more than 30 seconds.

I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.

The Internet is full of choices, and nobody is going to make the choice to use a product that is hard to use or unattractive.

You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience. These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn't matter which department you're in.

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.

We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.

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.

The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay.

When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.

Even if it's not always the best markup, what are Facebook and Twitter? They're web standards with some scripts. They may not validate, but they're still CSS layouts and simple markup, and that's great!

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.

Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities.

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.

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.