Usability quotes:

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Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it. -- Jakob Nielsen
Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table. -- Alan Cooper
Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand. -- Donald Norman
Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel. -- Donald A. Norman
Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible. -- James Dyson
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. -- Theodor Adorno
80% of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning. -- Roger Black
Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity. -- Jakob Nielsen
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. -- Jakob Nielsen
In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive soft drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use. -- Donald A. Norman
The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web. -- Jakob Nielsen
The argument is not between adding features and simplicity, between adding capability and usability. The real issue is about design: designing things that have the power required for the job while maintaining understandabili ty, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment. -- Donald A. Norman
Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones. -- Jakob Nielsen
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. -- Joel Spolsky
One thing I've always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they'll tell you, 'We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.' -- Bill Gates
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? -- Jakob Nielsen
Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change. You'll make mistakes along the way, but that's where growth and forgiveness come in. -- Jeffrey Zeldman
Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand. -- Donald Norman
If you don't have people that care about usability on your project, your project is doomed. -- Jeff Atwood
Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can't use what you can't find. -- Peter Morville
Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered. -- Ryan Holmes
It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers. -- Brian Kernighan
A painting doesn't have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people's needs. -- Henrik Fisker
I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt. -- Steve Krug
When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design. -- Steve Krug
The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay. -- Jeffrey Zeldman

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