“How can companies better connect to its customers? The answer is simple: Speak like people, not like machines… More and more, people are craving authentic experiences from the world around them, and that means a simple human-to-human connection. In our ‘user experience’ world, this means when people use a website, software, product, etc., people should somehow experience the people that created it. Connection.” – Bill DeRouchey

Check out Bill’s interview with Jeroen van Geel for more on “Challenges and Authentic Experiences.”

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“If we are going to succeed in anything, especially the ever changing design world, we are going to have to have a strong passion for what we do… Our passion is going to be the driving force behind our motivation (even when we have none) to be the best, to make a contribution to the design community. It will provide the fuel to go the extra mile for clients and for ourselves.” – Aaron Irizarry

Read more from Aaron in his article “How to Stay Ahead of the Curve as a Designer.”

1. Design is a way of changing life and influencing the future
2. One of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business
3. Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered

“Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs.” – Patrick Lynch

Patrick’s quote is from the article “Visual Desision Making.”

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1. Designers need to get better with using data
2. Solve problems by moving from data, to information, to knowledge, to wisdom
3. Design can help find new solutions to problems and drive innovation

“Attractive things work better… When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.” – Don Norman

This quote is from the article “The Secret of Apple Design” by Technology Review. This site requires a login to read the full article. Read more from Don on this subject in his paper “Attractive Things Work Better.” (PDF)

Thanks to Robert Shedd for submitting this quote!

1. Designs should be informed, but not solely determined by user experience data.

“Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people. Along the way, it can generate better profits as well.” – Bruce Nussbaum

Read Bruce’s interview with Peter Lawrence, chairman of the Corporate Design Foundation, for his thoughts on why “designers must take the lead in the New Economy.”

Thanks to @ibmdesign for sharing this quote.

1. Design addresses needs that customers themselves may not know they have
2. Creating a successful product requires designing the Total User Experience
3. We need to keep our eye on people

“In an ideal world, social responsibility would be a prerequisite for design, and designers would vow to produce beautiful, useful, positive, responsible, functional, and economical things and concepts that are meaningful additions to—or sometimes subtractions from—the world we live in. Indeed, design deserves such thoughtful consideration.” – Paola Antonelli

Read more from Paola, senior curator of design and architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in her article “Core Principles” from Seed Magazine.

Thanks to @nonperishable and @21xdesign for sharing this article on Twitter!

1. Good design produces something the world didn’t know it was missing
2. Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered
3. We have to understand the world surrounding our designs

“I’ve come to believe strongly that one of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business, and indeed to everyday life. In my experience, good clients and good designers don’t see this goal as being opposed to—or even separate from—achieving business goals, but rather an integral part of it.” – Michael Bierut

Read more from Michael in his 2006 interview with Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path.

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1. The measure of success for design is the degree of its impact
2. Design and business leaders must take the time to understand each other
3. Design needs to be embedded as a competency within an organization

“Designers don’t actually ‘solve’ problems. They ‘work through’ them. They use non-logical processes that are difficult to express in words but easier to express in action. They use models, mockups, sketches, and stories as their vocabulary. They operate in the space between knowing and doing, prototyping new solutions that arise from their four strengths of empathy, intuition, imagination, and idealism.” – The Designful Company by Marty Neumeier

Check out Marty’s book The Designful Company for his thoughts on “how to build a culture of nonstop innovation.”

1. The most innovative designers cultivate an appetite for “thinking wrong”
2. Businesses need to do more than hire designers. They need to be designers.
3. Design needs to reflect the innovation culture of a company

“As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.” – Peter Morville

This quote is from Peter’s article “User Experience Design” that describes his well-known “user experience honeycomb.”

1. Leaders must become experience executives
2. Design can help find new solutions to problems and drive innovation
3. Remarkable experiences leave a mark

“Information architecture is at the very center of the electronic information storm. Without effective means to structure and present the information we produce we are blown about by the vast quantities and the variable quality of that information. IA provides you a deep keel and a strong rudder to surf above the waves of information that buffet you.” – Bob Boiko

This quote is from the Information Architecture Institute’s IA testimonials.

1. Great information architecture leads the site to behave as the visitor expects
2. Information architecture is about mission-critical infrastructure
3. Effective information architects make the complex clear