Donald Norman Quotes

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people's lives.

Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.

I think it's ultimately inhuman to only see things for their functionality. We want things to be more than that. The desire for beauty is something that's in us, and it's not trivial.

Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.

Most industrial designers do a bottle or a pen or a computer - things that go right past your eye. When you see a chair, it's almost like a person. It's this great big thing in front of you. It hits you more.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

If you don't have an emotionally engaging design for a device, no one will care about it.

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

Integrating breakthrough technology into everyday products is always a challenge; at the same time, this is exactly how design makes tech products easily adoptable in life.

I ended up going to do a matches program at the state for industrial design. And from there, I got hired at IDEO to joint their design team there - and basically, you are starting as an industrial designer to design products - and then kept asking the question, 'What else can design accomplish? What else can design do?'

To me, it's important to try and make an emotional connection with the audience.

Great design is so many things all at the same time. It is emotional, functional, and responsive. It creates an unwritten dialogue, a connection, between itself and those who experience it. It is open to interpretation yet created for a specific purpose. It creates meaning and value.

When I design, I think about the desire someone might have for it and why. I want them to fall in love with it.

You want a great product, you want things that resonate with people and make them dance.

I think the emotional appeal of a platform is what works. I think the old-media entities still have not figured out that part of the game plan.

You have to make people feel things. I think that's what commercials are, from a commercial for a car, a phone or anything that might be, they want to do it. The first iPhone was sold by how exciting it was to hold pictures of your family, not how great a phone it was.

I couldn't make a headphone look like a piece of medical equipment or a toy, as most headphones do.

We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn't want to pay us for. One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn't design without us.

Product design is fed by the avant-garde.

Great product trumps all. You can have the biggest marketing budget, the biggest show, a perfect merchandising plan, but at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything if the design and quality of the product you are offering is not compelling.

The key to industrial leadership is technology and design; of the two, technology is quantifiable and design is not. Technological improvements might make your product worth another $20. If you design something beautiful, what is that worth? It's worth whatever people will pay for it.

We must have options to make tennis more attractive emotions-wise.

When something is aspirational, you don't want someone to be thinking about payment every single time.

A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.