“Design is learning by making.” – Joey Hasty

Joey is an Interactive Creative Director at Disney. This quote is from Joey’s talk about Disney’s creative approach at Geekend 2009.

Thanks to @daveIxD for tweeting this quote.

1. Designers are trained to be courageous about the future—and making the future happen
2. Designers have to be open to the changes that technology is making in our discipline
3. Design strategy is about understanding and meeting needs and aspirations

“It isn’t sufficient to simply eliminate user error—designing user delight is the goal.” – IBM Design

This quote is from IBM Design’s Twitter feed.

1. Good design isn’t decoration. Good design is problem solving.
2. Designs should be informed, but not solely determined by user experience data.
3. Design strategy is about understanding and meeting needs and aspirations

“If we want to create passionate users, we have to help them get better.  Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at. If we can help them have richer, deeper, better experiences, we have a chance of making them passionate… If we could help our users be awesome, what would that mean to them?” – Kathy Sierra

This quote is from Kathy’s Ignite presentation “Being Better is Better.” View the video or Joey deVilla’s summary of this presentation for more great insights.

1. What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences
2. It takes great empathy to create a good experience
3. Create a meaningful conversation with your users by engaging them on a personal level

“Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.” – Gentry Underwood

Read more in Gentry’s article “Social Software: The other ‘Design for Social Impact’.”

1. Focus on the experience that the products you design engender
2. Design is about cultural invention
3. Design is not rocket science. It’s social science.

“If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense – the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product’s components.” – Don Norman

Read more in Don’s article “Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product.”

1. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences.
2. Everything we do should be to help move the product a little closer to success
3. A great product doesn’t just do its job; it does something more.

“It’s becoming increasingly hard to do large-scale digital product design without integrating an understanding of data… Data analytics can help create and optimize opportunities. Designers versed in data may uncover trends or insights that not only yield better products but new product or business ideas as well.” – Luke Wroblewski

This quote is from Luke’s article “Data in the Design.”

1. Designers need to get better with using data
2. Designs should be informed, but not solely determined by user experience data.
3. Solve problems by moving from data, to information, to knowledge, to wisdom

“Products that are well designed have value beyond necessity: The defining feature of a great product isn’t its power, its size, its speed, or its novelty. We value things according to the quality of the experience we have when we use them… A great product doesn’t just do its job; it does something more.” – Harold Hambrose

This quote is from Harold’s book “Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software and How You Can Release the Power to Innovate.”

1. Design is everyone’s job. It takes a commitment from everybody in the company.
2. Everything we do should be to help move the product a little closer to success
3. Delivering great user experiences plays a significant role in your company’s success

“Many of the most compelling usability test insights come not from the elements that are evaluated, but rather those not evaluated… The unintended conclusions—the peripheral insights—are often what feed a designer’s instincts most.” – Robert Hoekman Jr.

Read more in Robert’s article “The Myth of Usability Testing.”

1. Focus on understanding the behavior and performance of people using a design
2. Design not only for what users can do, but what they will do
3. Make it easy for customers to perform useful tasks

“As the old saying goes, in the expert’s mind there are few possibilities, but for one with the beginner’s mind, the world is wide open. Designers understand the need to take risks, especially during early explorations of the problem. They are not afraid to break with convention. Good designers are open minded and comfortable with ambiguity early on in the process, this is how discoveries are made.” – Garr Reynolds

This quote is from Garr’s article “10 tips on how to think like a designer.”

1. Design is a “whole brain” process
2. Design is about choices and intentions, it is not accidental
3. Designers have to be open to the changes that technology is making in our discipline

“If we continue to treat content as an extra to information architecture, to content management or to anything else, we miss a bright opportunity to influence users. Content is not a nice-to-have extra. Content is a star of the user experience show. Let’s make content shine.” – Colleen Jones

Read more from Colleen in her article “The Debut of Usable, Influential Content” from ASIS&T’s August/September 2009 Bulletin.

1. Content is an opportunity to make customer relationships flourish
2. Manage the task the user wishes to complete, not the content or technology
3. Create a meaningful conversation with your users by engaging them on a personal level