Joe Gebbia Quotes

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.

Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.

With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.

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

The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.

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

It is incredibly powerful if you solve the problem you actually have yourself. It's really tough to develop a good product when you don't have very close proximity to the people who actually use your product. The closest proximity you can have to those people is to be that person.

I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

Knowing how people will use something is essential.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

Experience is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue.

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

With age comes a greater understanding and a greater worldview.

We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

I'm more user-experience and technology-minded. James is good at knowing what the user is going to buy, and the creative world he's buying them into.

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

Wisdom is the use of knowledge

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.