25 UX quotes for an entrepreneur to build user experience

UX Quotes: This article is a collection of my favourites quotes on user experience. You’ll see about 25 user experience quotes int this collection as we chat through the importance of UX from a startup perspective. You can easily extend this to any business context, but you know that I can’t resist the temptation to talk about these from an entrepreneur’s perspective.

1. What is user experience, meaning and definition of user experience
2. Why is UX important in a startup
3. Best UX quotes
4. User design quotes, UI quotes

What is user experience? 

As the name indicates, user experience is defined as the feeling users get while using your product/service. This feeling can be emotional, social or utilitarian depending on the purpose of your product. Generally for a software, the user experience relates to how a customer feels when they use your software. The most common parameters are – speed, performance and accessibility, colours used on your site, ability to navigate from start to finish etc.

In other words, user experience means the complete journey a user takes while using your product. It involves the process from deciding to use your solution to what they feel after completing a task. It is a holistic journey from start to finish to achieve the result a user wants. When you think about user experience, make sure you concentrate on the touchpoint you have with your customer to define the right product usage experience.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience

Why is user experience important for a startup?

Large companies spend loads on user experience because tiny improvements can result in huge revenue spikes. How is user experience important in a startup? As an innovative startup, if you’re creating a solution in a new market, you can get away with an average user experience. However if your product depends on the concepts of delivering a minimum lovable product instead of an MVP, your UX is very important.

A good quality UX can result in your customer falling in love with your product right away. We can immediately start talking about customer loyalty, their connection to your solution etc. If people love what you do, you have better chance of staying alive in the market longer term. This is very valuable in a B2C segment which relies on the number of users signing up, high churn etc. Even in the app or gaming sector, your user experience will create your USP and help you stay ahead of the competition. Remember, in a startup, your USP is one of the most valuable things that an investor will be interested in. This is particularly true in an early stage startup. As your company grows, your UX will become a necessity rather than a differentiator in expanding the market because the competition will catchup with you by then.

With this background, I’d like to present a few UX quotes in this article to inspire us. They are further broken down into different segments such as:

• UX quotes, inspiring quotes on user experience
• UX design quotes

UX Quotes

Here is a collection of 10 best UX quotes. I will caveat by saying that these quotes created an impact on me and I couldn’t resist sharing. I’d love to know what these quotes make you think.

The user experience quotes are meant to bring our focus back to things that matter the most. Business sense indicates that our first priority is the customer. That’s precisely the focus of these user experience quotes. The moment we take our mind away from the customer, it starts falling apart. There are multiple examples of companies that have got these wrong. The most common examples are the ones who try to push advertising and prompting you to buy unnecessary things where revenue overrides customer experience. As a UX designer, your biggest challenge will be to fight this temptation and act as the representative of user experience and ease.

1. People ignore design that ignores people
2. Design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.
3. Design is everywhere. From the dress you’re wearing to the smartphone you’re holding, it’s design
4. If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design – Dr. Ralf Speth
5. Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users – Dana Chisnell
6. Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t – IBM
7. The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak— Hans Hofmann
8. Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple — C.W. Ceram
9. What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences. If they have great experience with your product [and] they have great experiences with your service, they’re going to be passionate about your brand, they’re going to be committed to it. That’s how you build that kind of commitment – Jesse James Garrett
10. You have to start with the customer experience and work your way back to technology — Steve Jobs 

User Experience Quotes

People ignore design that ignores people

As a startup, entrepreneur or a business founder – your business thrives on how people receive it. Without customers, we’re dead even before we start. I agree that we can’t always produce everything that the customer wants. But the first and foremost point for a UX or a product manager is to look at the people consuming it. If they’re not accounted for or represented well in the user research process, a UX design will fail and hence perhaps this is my favourite quote in the best UX quotes collection.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple

The user experience quotes is all about simplicity and making it easy for the customer. If the consumer has to go through series of instructions or user videos, then there’s something wrong in the user experience design. It is our job as either a PM or a UX person to identify what these customer journeys are. We will never get it right in the first go. User experience will be an iterative process. It is also time sensitive and needs to adapt to stay in line with the user journeys and expectations with time.

If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design

I love early stage startups and can appreciate the lack of funds in early stages. The article – how to run a startup without money is all about bootstrapping and being able to produce the first MVP or product iteration. Note that however, it is expensive because you’ll end up spending lots of time creating an average product. A good design is produced with experience and sometimes the best resources who can understand the user intent, journey and outcome properly.

A bootstrapped startup can save money, but can it save time and goodwill of the customer? Both of these are very important questions to ask while designing your startup.

UX Design Quotes

In this section we will talk about a few UX design quotes. I’ve separated the user experience quotes from design quotes mainly because of the motivation behind these two operations. Sometimes startups view UX design as a one off exercise that defines the core parameters of your product usage. I can appreciate the temptation because a startup is responding to managing multiple outcomes with very limited resources. As a company grows, the UX design process will be more continuous than user experience. User experience however is a continuous process and it extends beyond the initial design or framework in which a customer interacts with your product/solution

1. Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem-solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion — Bob Baxley
2. Because every person knows what he likes, every person thinks he is an expert on user interfaces – Paul Heckel
3. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works— Steve Jobs
4. A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good – Martin LeBlanc 
5. Design needs to be plugged into human behavior. Design dissolves in behavior – Naoto Fukasawa
6. 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 – Jakob Nielsen
7. If you find an element of your interface requires instructions… redesign it — Dan Rubin
8. Number one for product design: minimize the gap between what your product is and why it exists — Luke Wroblewski
9. In a world where everybody screams, silence is noticeable. White space provides the silence — Massimo Vignelli 
10. Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information — Edward Tufte
11. Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest.” — Jean-Louis Gassée 
12. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it — Alan Perlis 
13. Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent — Joe Sparano 
14. Rule of thumb for UX: More options, more problems
15. When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as “SOME User Experience” or SUX?

UX Design Quotes