Resources - Quotes & facts
We've brought together some of the best quotes, facts and design tips for you to peruse - but if you have more, just email them to us and we'll add them to the list.
Quotes
"Most software needs to be spanked"
Alan Cooper
"In most projects, the first system build
is barely usable. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build
a throwaway or promise to deliver the throwaway to customers."
Fred Brooke in The Mythical Man Month
"All programmers are playwrights and
all computers are lousy actors"
unknown source
"In the age of the net, there will be
less time to think, more need for quick response."
Esther Dyson in Release 2.0: a Design for living in the digital age.
"Computers are useless, they can only
give you answers."
Pablo Picasso
"Computers make it easier to do a lot
of things, but most of the things the make easier to do don't need to
be done."
Andy Rooney
"Every single thing made by man or woman
since the beginning of time has been designed. In other words, some thought,
usually combined with basic instinct, has occurred in the decision making
process to decide how the object should work and how it should look."
Sir Terrance Conran, - Industrial Design - Reflection of a Century.
"When Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly's hero,
Frankenstein, endowed his synthetic robot man with a human heart, the
monster which before had been a useful mechanical servant suddenly became
an uncontrollable force."
A.A. Berlin Jr
"All our knowledge has its origins in our
perceptions'"
Leonardo da Vinci
"The computer does the work and the user does
the thinking."
Allan Cooper in About Face
"There's one thing more painful that learning
from experience, and that is not learning from experience."
anonymous
"Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the
treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber
of thought."
Saint Basil
"Each information level we are forced to transcend
in search of a fact lessens our desire to perform the search in an inverse
square proportion"
Goodman
"Thought is the blossom; language the bud;
action the fruit behind it."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The desire to impose upon the disorder of
nature some orderly pattern or arrangement makes men into poets, painters
and gardeners; it also makes them prey to the illusion that a highly organised
state will be civilised."
Len Deighton
"A methods of solution is perfect if we can
foresee from the start, and even prove, that following that method we
shall attain out aim."
Gottfried W. von Leibnitz
Facts
User interface is 47% - 60% of the lines of system
or application code.
Macintyre, Estep and Sieburth, 1990
A GUI is minimally 29% of the software development
budget and increases with available functions.
Rosenburg, 1989
The UI has been documented as commanding 40% of
the development effort.
Wixon & Jones, 1992
Recent estimates show 80% of software life-cycle
costs occur during the post-release maintenance phase.
Pressman 1992
A review of necessary maintenance is due to
unmet or unforeseen user requirements, and 20% is due to "bugs"
or reliability problems.
Martin and McClure, 1983
63% of software projects exceed their budget
estimates, with the top four reasons all relating to product usability:
frequent requests for changes by users, overlooked tasks, users' lack
of understanding of their own requirements, and insufficient user analysis
communication and understanding.
Leaderer & Prassad, 1992
The implementation of usability engineering
techniques have demonstrated reductions in the product development cycle
by 33% - 50%.
Bosert, 1991
Want some more usability facts? Click to see our 'cost justifying usability' page.
Design Tips
"Simplicity in design depends on three
closely related principles. The elements in the design must be unified
to produce coherent, whole, the parts (as well as the whole) must be refined
to focus the viewer's attention on their essential aspects, and the fitness
of the solution to the communication problem must be ensured at every
level."
Kevin Mullet and Darren Sano, in Designing Visual Interfaces
"(Visual) imagery can be used in four
ways: to access information stored in memory, help one reason, learn new
skills, and aid comprehension of verbal descriptions."
Stephen M. Kosslyn and Oliver Koenig, in Wet Minds, The New cognitive
Neuroscience
"People's reaction to icons are twofold:
either they delight in clever helpful images, or they find then obscure
enigmas, frustrating and pointless."
William Ghorton, in The Icon Book
"Never make the user ask to ask."
Allan Cooper in About Face
"Things that behave differently should
look different."
Allan Cooper in About Face
"Don't ask coders to design while they
code."
Allan Cooper in About Face
"User interface design is not guesswork."
Allan Cooper in About Face
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