Tim Cook Quotes

I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.

A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with.

I once got a postcard from a French poet who wrote - "you don't know me but I'm always very grumpy when I get up in morning. But when I get up now I put the tea kettle on, and when it starts to sing it makes me smile - goddamn you!" That's what happened when we first designed it - we got a lot of mail.

What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.

Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a 'neat' technology or some 'cool' product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding-all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience.

A great product will survive all abuse. Google Glass is a great product. How do I know? Every person I put it on (I did it dozens of times at 500 Startups yesterday) smiles. No other product has done that since the iPod.

Good design makes a product understandable.

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

For a product to really be sustainable, it's really got to deliver the goods for the end user. That drives the whole rest of the equation.

Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products... We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are.

Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves

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

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.

Ultimately progress is measured sort of through the eyes of users.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

Attractive things work better.

The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.

Products were once designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition, pleasure is equated with emotion; today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.

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

Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.