UX Quotes Library
A collection of our favorite quotes about Wireframing, UX, and Design. Submit a quote!Wallowing in that state of not knowing is not easy, but it’s necessary.
To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.
What works good is better than what looks good because what works good lasts.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Precisely measure the results that are important to you. Stay blind to the metrics that don't matter.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
The best designers and the best programmers are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.
When you build an app always look out for the non-essential features. Make sure they don’t make it into your v1.0.
Even early on, don’t forget to involve the people that’ll actually be building the thing you’re designing.
In order for error messages to be effective, people need to see them, understand them, and be able to act upon them easily.
Create login forms that are simple, linkable, predictable, and play nicely with password managers.
Great design revolves around context and value.
People should be able to quickly scan the navigation and understand which links are primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation items.
A common trap for designers is to only focus on creating designs that represent the perfect state of a user interface.
Remind users what they’re getting out of filling out all these input fields. Tell them why it’s worth it.
The usability gap is that you have the feature; but people can't use it.
A good product designer needs to start every task by first understanding why it’s important for the business.
Thinking about what the buttons do makes it easier to decide where to put them.
To find the obvious, get close to the problem.
Dropdowns are like the Swiss Army Knife of input fields. But with its versatility also comes usability problems.
Facilitating collaboration between Development and UX Design is one of the best things companies can do to get optimal results.
While not a sexy web design topic, the styling and content of a footer can actually go a long way in helping the user access pertinent information.
Annotations can save time by proactively answering potential questions about your design.
Being intentional about our designs means knowing that our job is to solve user needs, not to keep developers busy.
Seek feedback throughout the product cycle — from initial ideation all the way to the 'final' shipped design and beyond.
User Journey Maps are a great tool to identify pain points and unmet user needs.
While friction can be seen as a road-block in some journeys, for others it provides a change of pace that is needed.
A design isn’t the product or website itself — it’s a way to communicate a user experience to those who will build it.
We need to make conscious decisions about what information needs to be visible and what can be a click or a scroll away.
We are not our users. We are even less our expert users.
When a client asks you to design a landing page to 'educate users' or to 'make them sign up to' you absolutely need to start asking questions.
One of the best ways to ensure a design is well-reasoned is to be 'forced' to describe it verbally or by flowing out the logic.
The priorities should guide the pixels and not the other way around.
It’s important not to confuse goals with tasks. For instance, a user’s goal isn’t to fill in a form.
Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity
Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion.
When a business defies the traditional, when it ‘colors outside the lines,’ customers often receive exceptional experiences.
Information architecture helps make sure that business needs and user needs are met, leaving everyone happy, and isn’t that really what it’s all about?
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!
Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information.
If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.
Provide an experience that is both useful, usable, desirable, and differentiated and you will create demand for your brand and delight your customers.
In our vast search-driven Web, visual design can help people move beyond first impressions and into meaningful interactions.
Observe how your users approach information, consider what it means, and design to allow them to achieve what they need.
Features are meaningless. They mean nothing to users. A coherent product user interface is the product to users.
Design creates stories, and stories create memorable experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Doing what's necessary to move the product forward and get consensus before building is what we see wireframes being useful for.
Wireframing allows you to get all of your thoughts out of your head and onto the screen quickly and cheaply.
Wireframes are great because they will get you 80% of the information that you need to communicate with 20% of the effort of a more pixel-perfect tool.
Work in the lowest fidelity possible at first.
All in all, a wireframe is just a skeleton of the visual design. It maps where interface elements should live and how users should experience them.
Designers need customer empathy to create the best user experiences they possibly can.
In most cases, your best bet for settling design disputes is to get the design(s) in question in front of customers.
Let users focus on the task at hand. You can have more actions on the page, but make sure there is only one primary.
Designing for action is a critical part of creating user interfaces and websites. It's how you help users take the steps to accomplish their goals.
Understanding how and where your users will focus their attention will allow you to design more effective and easy-to-use products.
Master visual hierarchy to make your UI more effective and easy to read.
Feedback can be hard to take, but practicing it often and early is part of the process to get your team’s best work out the door.
Always keep in mind that your users are busy and that you have the power to make their life and work easier.
Wireframes can be an ideal tool for validating design solutions early in the product design process.
Observing real people trying your product using wireframes is an effective and cost-saving step in validating design ideas.
Effective wireframes facilitate discussion, promote alignment, and supply instructions for developers.
Don't start designing until you're sure you know who you're designing for, what they care about, and how the existing system works.
Ensure that what you design addresses a problem real users face and care about. People want solutions, not products.
Focusing on the user keeps you focused on solving the right problem.
Wireframes are great for divergent exploration. Go broad. Real creative exploration requires leaps.
Design is a team sport. Listening and feeding off each other’s ideas will result in more thought-through solutions to the user’s problem.
Use wireframes to turn the problem or solution into something visual that everyone can refer to, discuss, and build on.
The goal of any good artifact is a shared understanding of either the problem or a possible solution.
Good data design lets you scan, decide and act efficiently.
Don’t forget to ask for feedback. No matter how much work you put into your design, you likely aren't the one using it.
Longer pages are totally acceptable to users. They really don’t notice page length unless the design is cluttered and unruly.
The more information you ask for on a form, the less likely they are to be completed.
Two column forms are more difficult to scan and track as you fill them out.
When you run into a roadblock or don't like what you've created, simply jump to a new wireframe and try another idea.
When you spend extra time on visual aspects of your design, you forget about the purpose of wireframing — to communicate and validate ideas.
If you are new to design, copying the interface of existing apps can help.
Incorporating another person's idea will give them an investment in the design and turn them into an advocate for it.
If you expect that people might not like some part of your design, have some alternates ready to show.
The goal of annotations is to make the understanding of how and why something should work as clear as possible.
If you get stuck, try limiting yourself to 5 minutes per wireframe. After 5 minutes, create a new one and try to come up with a totally different idea.
Wireframing your product’s key screens should be the first pass of your interface design, making the highest priority screens the most visible.
As you make polished wireframes, the slope becomes slippery as visual design decisions creep in.
Having a design system to reference can allow you to jump straight from wireframes to code without leaving the final vision undefined.
Focusing on creating only good ideas may restrict you; instead, try to create as many bad ideas as possible.
The more you know about what will go into the site, the better you can plan the design to fit the content.
Start with the middle screen size when designing mobile apps.
Design should never say, ‘Look at me.’ It should always say, ‘Look at this.'
Good design is design that not only achieves a desired effect, but shapes our expectation of what the experience can be.
Scientists try to identify the components of existing structures, designers try to shape the components of new structures.
Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.
Like the perfect score to a film, a good user experience is unobtrusive and transparent to the consumer because ‘it just works.'
Good web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.
The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for (whether intentional or not).
The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem.
Lorem Ipsum, wireframes, personas, etc are just tactics. The only thing that matters is: Do people love what you built?
Good design admits to the deeper insight that beyond performing a purpose in a good way, the purpose itself has to be good.
Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.
It’s good to make people happy, but it’s better to help people make themselves happy. Design for strength.
The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for 'thinking wrong.'
Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful.
For a human being the product is not an end in itself but the gateway to a plethora of experiences.
Design has a social function and its true purpose is to improve people’s lives.
Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.
You don’t sacrifice the experience for growth; you drive growth from the quality of the experience.
Writing is designing with words. Designing is writing without them.
Experience design is more about the kind of experience users actually have than about controlling the experience you try to give them.
Good design is about effective communication, not decoration at the expense of legibility.
Wireframes are tools for thinking, communicating, and engaging your colleagues throughout the entire design process.
Wireframes tend to provide more information than sketches alone, and the process of creating them encourages more exploration than prototyping alone.
One of the mottos of wireframing is: fidelity should correspond to certainty.
Unlike a prototype, which must accurately reflect the final product, we determine a wireframe’s effectiveness by the conversations it creates.
Good wireframes are the product of many rounds of iteration. Take advantage of the ease with which you can quickly create and change a lot of ideas.
The most successful products result from taking risks. You have to be okay with being wrong many times in order to get the design right.
A good wireframe should be designed from the user’s point-of-view.
A great design solution for a poorly defined problem is infinitely worse than a decent solution applied to a well-defined problem.
The reaction you don’t want from others is, 'Ok, now what?' A good wireframe allows the next person to pick it up and run with it.
Keep in mind that you’re designing for real people. Your goal is to solve their problem in an effective and easy-to-understand way.
Constraints help you narrow the number of possible design ideas from everything to something more manageable.
Shipping great digital products relies on individuals who produce great work and support smooth, collaborative handoffs of their work between roles.
Wireframing is more than just creating artifacts; it’s a process of collaborative design.
Whenever you wireframe, be clear about your goals, and communicate those goals to anyone you share the wireframe with.
Wireframes allow everyone to participate in product design, rather than depending on one person with highly specialized skills.
Learning to create effective wireframes requires a paradigm shift toward seeing them as a flexible, creative tool, rather than as a means to an end.
When we think of wireframes as a tool for thinking and communicating, the audience for wireframes and their uses become much broader.
Everyone benefits when their expectations align and they’re able to participate in product conversations. Bringing people together is wireframing’s superpower.
Unlike skills that take years to develop, wireframing can benefit you on your very first try.
👏 Special thanks to Catriona Shedd, who created and hosted InspireUX, which powered our quotes library for over 10 years!