A UX Manifesto Through Quotes

> Interface matters to me more than anything else, and it always has. I just never realized that. I've spent a lot of time over the years desperately trying to think of a "thing" to change the world. I now know why the search was fruitless -- things don't change the world. People change the world by using things. The focus must be on the "using", not the "thing". Now that I'm looking through the right end of the binoculars, I can see a lot more clearly, and there are projects and possibilities that genuinely interest me deeply. - Bret Victor

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. - John Gall

> The opposite of "simple" is not "complex," but rather "elaborate." One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible -- not by making it simple. Whether that goal demands a simple picture, an elaborate one, or an intentionally complex one is almost always determined by the audience and its familiarity with the subject being addressed - Dan Roam

> I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late. - C.A.R Hoare

> The magic we need more in today's technological world is of the latter kind. We should strive to increase deepness rather than outward Complexity, human virtuosity rather than consumerism, flexibility rather than effortlessness. The mysteries should invite attempts at understanding and exploitation rather than blind reliance or worship; this is also the key difference between esoterica and superstition. - Viznut

> We divide groups into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two -- the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity -- you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. - Malcolm Gladwell

> when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. - Unknown

> A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. - Alan Kay

> Oftentimes, invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to say -- first of all, search yourself -- "Are they right?" And if they are, you need to adapt what you're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention. - Jeff Bezos

> Imagine you have a friend who has trouble forming relationships with women, and he tells you, "I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I go on a date, and I bring a thermometer so I can measure their skin temperature. I bring calipers so I can measure their pupil, to see when it's expanding and contracting..." The point is, it doesn't even matter if these are the correct things to measure to predict someone's sexual arousal. If you bring a thermometer and calipers with you on a date... There's really only one important question worth asking, which is: what is a life well-lived?... That's a question that can't be answered, but one thing we can say, with a lot of certainty, is that a life well-lived is not going to be a life in which every moment is scrutinized. - Frank Lantz

> Brave to write it, all by itself, and then brave to show it. It is like opening your ribcage, and letting someone see the little bird you have inside. What if they don’t Love the bird? It’s not like you can change it. I mean.. That’s your bird. - Tycho

> Make the goose a manager. Give the goose a deadline. Require the goose to explain to you how they're going to make the next egg. This is just at the level of ridiculousness that's going on. Nobody who thinks like this has ever laid a golden egg. It's not their business. Their business is to count those golden eggs after they get laid. - Alan Kay

> Discoverability is often cited as npm’s biggest flaw. Many blog posts — scratch that, entire websites — have been created to try and mitigate the difficulty of finding what you need on npm. Everyone has an idea about how to make it easier to find needles in the haystack, but no-one bothers to ask what all this hay is doing here in the first place. - Rich Harris

> These are soft skills that we gain through practice over time. June eliminates this self-education. Instead of teaching ourselves to cook, we’re teaching a machine to cook. And while that might make a product more valuable in the long term for a greater number of users, it’s inherently less valuable to us as individuals, if for no other reason than that even in the best-case scenarios of machine learning, we all have individual tastes. And what averages out across millions of people may end up tasting pretty . . . average - Mark Wilson