Usability Quotes

This page is a collection of quotations related to usability, communication and design. They were collected from all over the web and from books.

Usability is like oxygen -- you never notice it until it is missing...
- Unknown authors

It's quite normal for e-commerce sites to increase sales by 100% or more as a result of usability. More important, they can probably avoid 9 of 10 returns by eliminating most mis-designed items (a 1000% improvement of the error rate metric).
- Jakob Nielsen

Over the last year online banking has attracted 6.3 million users, but a massive 3.1 million of those have closed their accounts already due to poor website design and inefficient service.
- Internet Money Issue 4

While internet sales continue to soar, recent surveys from companies that advise e-commerce merchants put the number of "abandoned shopping carts" at between 27 per cent and 66 per cent.
- JS Online

A report by Creative Good showed that 39 per cent of test shoppers failed in their buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate. Additionally, 56 per cent of search attempts failed.
- Creative Good

Changes cost less when made earlier in the development life cycle. Twenty changes in a project, at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35, would cost $22,400. Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600. Savings = $16,800.
- Human Factors International, 2001

Usability techniques allowed a high-tech company to reduce the time spent on one tedious development task by 40%.
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994

Speeding up development is a key goal for integrating usability effectively into product development. A one-quarter delay in bringing a product to market may result in the loss of 50% of the product's profit.
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994

Sun Microsystems has shown how spending about $20,000 could yield a savings of $152 million dollars. Each and every dollar invested could return $7,500 in savings.
- Rhodes, 2000

Online shoppers spend most of their time and money at websites with the best usability.
- Nielsen, 1998

Good navigation and website design make it easier for users to find what they're looking for and to buy it once they've found it.
- Donahue, 2001

You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by providing sufficient product information to your customers at the right time.
- UI Engineering, 2001

The magnitude of usability improvements is usually large. This is not a matter of increasing use by a few percent. It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales.
- Nielsen, July 1999

Convoluted e-commerce sites can lose up to half of their potential sales if customers can't find merchandise, according to Forrester Research, Inc.
- Kalin, 1999

At HomePortfolio.com we monitored site traffic, observed consumers in usability studies and worked with internal business groups. This helped us make changes that made the site's purpose clearer and increased transaction rates measurably. The change increased the traffic up 129% the week we put it up.
- Interaction Design, Inc., 2001

More than 83 percent of Internet users are likely to leave a web site if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they're looking for.
- Arthur Andersen, 2001

What users want is convenience and results.
- Jef Raskin

Bad design can cost a Web site 40 percent of repeat traffic. A good design can keep them coming back. A few tests can make the difference.
- Kalin, 1999

In a 1999 study of Web users, respondents were asked to list the five most important reasons to shop on the Web. Even though low prices definitely do attract customers, pricing was only the third-most important issue for respondents. Most of the answers were related to making it easy, pleasant, and efficient to buy. The top reason was "Easy to place an order" by 83% of the respondents.
- Nielsen, February 1999

The importance of having a competitive edge in usability may be even more pronounced for e-commerce sites. Such sites commonly drive away nearly half of repeat business by not making it easy for visitors to find the information they need.
- Manning

The repeat customers are most valuable: new users at one e-commerce site studied spent an average of $127 per purchase, while repeat users spent almost twice as much, with an average of $251.
- Nielsen, August 1, 1997

A study from Zona Research found that 62% of Web shoppers have given up looking for the item they wanted to buy online (and 20% had given up more than three times during a two-month period).
- Nielsen, October 1998

In Jared Spool's study of 15 large commercial sites, users could only find information 42% of the time even though they were taken to the correct home page before they were given the test tasks.
- Nielsen, October 1998

A major computer company spent $20,700 on usability work to improve the sign-on procedure in a system used by several thousand people. The resulting productivity improvement saved the company $41,700 the first day the system was used.
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994

To build a model intranet, Bay Networks spent $3 million and two years studying the different ways people think about the same thing. The result: all think alike about the $10 million saved each year.
- Fabris, 1999

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.
- Nielsen, August 28, 1997

When systems match user needs, satisfaction often improves dramatically. In a 1992 Gartner Group study, usability methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%.
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994

In Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, author Robert Pressman shows that for every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product's release.
- IBM, 2001

At Microsoft several years ago, Word for Windows's print merge feature was generating a lot of lengthy (average = 45 minutes) support calls. As a result of usability testing and other techniques, the UI for the feature was adjusted. In the next release, support calls 'dropped dramatically'; Microsoft recognized 'significant cost savings'.
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994

Usability goals are business goals. Web sites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands.
- McCharty & Souza, Forrester research, September 1998

The benefits of usable technology include reduced training costs, limited user risk and enhanced performance.
- Vice president Al Gore, 1998

A recent study found that 46.1% of the respondents considered a site's appearance important when assessing a website's credibility; information design/structure was considered only 28.5% of the time.
- Fogg, Soohoo and Danielson, 2002

One thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse.
- Jack Handy

Design changes due to usability work at IBM resulted in an average reduction of 9.6 mins per task, saving $6.8 million in 1991 alone.
- Karat, 1990

Design changes from a usability study at Ford reduced the number of helpdesk calls with resulting savings of $100,000.
- Kitsuse, 1991

Design changes due to usability work in one project at IDS/American Express resulted in savings of $45 million.
- Chalupnik & Rinehart, 1992

Don't make me think.
- Steve Krug

Make it as simple as possible. But no simpler.
- Albert Einstein

If the user can't use it, it doesn't work.
- Susan Dray

To err is human, to really foul things up you need a computer.
- Paul Ehrlich

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.
- Samuel Clemens

Right now you are a prisoner of each application you use.
- Theodor Holm 'Ted' Nelson, October 2001

Usability is critical for any application, but for mass-market software, usability spells success or failure more clearly than any other feature.
- Dr. Jerrold Grochow, CTO, American Management Systems

Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use.
- Forrester Research

Know thy user, and you are not thy user.
- Arnie Lund

Learning is remembering what you are interested in.
- Richard Saul Wurman

When asked to set fire to the logs in your fireplace, a friend will oblige cheerfully. Asked to set fire to your house, the friend will at least say, "Are you quite sure?" Is this kind of behaviour too much to ask of a computer?
- John Shore, 1985

Because every person knows what he likes, every person thinks he is an expert on user interfaces.
- Paul Heckel, 1982

Bad news travels fast. A dissatisfied shopper tells around 10 other people about the shopper's bad experience.
- Albrecht & Zembre, 1985

The average look-to-buy ratio on the Web is a paltry 2.7%
- Kadison, et al., 1998

Based on data gathered for over 40 clients, the average proportion of development budget spent on usability-related activities was only about 2.2%.
- Usability by Design, 2002

77% of users return to content and information sites because of ease-of-use. Only 22% return because the site belongs to a favourite brand.
- Forrester, June 2001

Most websites today fail basic tests of usability.
- Forrester

By the middle of this decade, 4 to 8 percent of all retail sales will take place online.
- Fischer, 2001

World-wide productivity loss due to bad intranet usability is about one trillion dollars per year.
- Coyne et al., 2003

In the everyday world, we want to get on with the important things in life, not spend our time in deep thought attempting to open a can of food or dial a telephone number.
- Don Norman, 1988

People have not changed fundamentally in thousands of years. Technology changes constantly. It's the one that must adapt to us.
- Michael L. Dertouzos, 2002

66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity.
- The Economist, October 2004

Employees waste an average of one week a year struggling with their recalcitrant PCs.
- The Economist, October 2004

IT complexity will cost firms world-wide some $750 billion.
- The Economist, October 2004

Microsoft in a recent survey found that most consumers use only 10% of the features on offer in Microsoft Word. In other words, some 90% of this software is clutter that obscures the few features people actually want.
- The Economist, October 2004

Call centre 'problem related' calls dropped by 50% overnight when a redesign was done with usability as a priority.
- The Usability Company, 2004

Traffic to 2nd level areas of the AOL site was increased by 120% due to an improved sectional architecture thanks to usability testing.
- The Usability Company, 2004

The great strength of computers is that they can reliably manipulate vast amounts of data very quickly. Their great weakness is that they don�t have a clue as to what any of that data actually means.
- Stephen Cass, 2004

If there is a choice, test early, because more than 50% of all defects are usually introduced in the requirements stage alone.
- Edward Kit

Based on data gathered for over 40 clients, the average percent of development budget spent on usability-related activities was only about 2.2%
- Usability by Design, 2002

Most software needs to be spanked.
- Alan Cooper

One survey of 6000 computer users found an average of 5.1 hours per week wasted trying to use computers. More time is wasted in front of computers than on highways.
- Ben Shneiderman

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling---the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
- Niklaus Wirth

What most separates firms with a disciplined approach to customer-experience management from their peers? The use of primary user research. 68% of the disciplined firms report using primary research to understand customers compared to only 21% of the undisciplined firms’ the largest [gap] that we found.
- Forrester Research