Our Digital Experience team is constantly inspired by the world around us, with some of our greatest ideas and thoughts happening at the most unexpected times. We wouldn’t be creative experts if we didn’t have a eureka moment in the shower, or a brand new solution after spilling coffee on our favourite pants. Innovative solutions and customer-focussed designs can come from the simplest of day-to-day interactions, and as cliche as it may sound, quotes are also a great source of inspiration.
We’ve put together a list of user experience quotes from designers, business leaders, and philosophers that help keep us inspired and motivated to do what we do best – solve tricky problems!
“Talk to one user… start jumping to a solution. Talk to 5+ users… start understanding the problem.”
Luke Wroblewski, Product Director at Google
We can’t emphasise enough just how important it is to understand exactly what problems your customers are experiencing, how they’re interacting with your system/products and what they’re trying to achieve. Surveying just one user or stakeholder isn’t enough to understand the broad complexities that your project may entail and developing unverified solutions with poor or no research is ultimately setting your business up for failure, which leads us into our next quote.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar Cars
There’s a reason we conduct Discovery at the beginning of all of our Digital projects. According to the Project Management Institute:
- 38% of projects are not delivered on budget
- 45% of projects are not delivered on time
- 34% of projects experience scope creep
- 12% of projects fail
The common denominator for all of these is poor requirements gathering. No matter how good you think your product is, designing, building and launching a solution that doesn’t address customer or market needs will cost you a lot of time and money in the long run. Conducting a Discovery allows you to validate your idea, understand the customer experience, have a clear timeline and minimise risk (scope creep and budget blowouts).
“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good”.
Martin Leblanc, CEO of Iconfinder
This is one of my personal favourites, and there are a few variations of this quote out there. The best user interfaces, systems and products are often the simplest. Take a look at the Google homepage, there’s no fancy bells and whistles, no complex navigation menus, instructions or distractions – just a single search field that makes it pretty obvious what to do. If you need to provide an encyclopedia sized instruction manual along with your digital experience, then something isn’t right. Effective design should ultimately do the teaching for you, stepping users through your experience without requiring a university degree to do so.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
Jeffrey Zeldman
Content is king! Designing without content is just as bad as designing without understanding the problem. Digital experiences must be intentional, and content plays a large role in defining the design of systems, processes and interfaces.
Across all of these quotes, one thing is obvious. Understanding the who, what, why and how of your project is of the utmost importance before launching into the design and build of your product. At Codex, we always start our digital projects with Discovery. To learn more about our process and how we operate, take a look at our digital page, here.
