John Battelle Quotes

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers - which is why almost no technology ever works.

The reason we wouldn't make a seven-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point, it's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.

Software sucks because users demand it to.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

When you have trouble with things—whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industries—it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You're just messing around. You're scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You're in a car. It's bouncy, and you can't — it doesn't really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we're doing make sense in that context.

I personally think 3D Touch is a game changer. I find that my efficiency is way up with 3D touch because I can go through so many emails so quickly.

For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.

I think a beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly.

When David Goyer comes to the small screen, what he's actually doing is making the small screen bigger.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

I don't actually, as a general policy, block any sort of cookies. I keep them all turned on, and that's because I'm willing to make the tradeoff that I let companies gather this information about me in return for a better experience.

Of course Airbnb made mistakes the first year! Some came from our own preconceptions. When we started, we designed our interface for ourselves, Internet-savvy twentysomethings. We never considered the role of good eyesight in our interface - font size, vernacular; it all matters.

We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.

For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.

What someone does when viewing content on a tablet is different than the lean-back mentality of watching on the big screen.

I always direct next to the camera and watch my actors, and so you can see the small things that you can't see on the small screen but you can definitely see on the big screen.

It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.

I find that I often forget that people come from all over. In interfaces, products, experiences, and building for people, we always forget that people are not us.

I think that because television is shot on a really fast schedule, and it gets piped into your home on a smaller screen, it's much more about character and dialogue in a lot of cases than the movies are.