Jan Koum Quotes

The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed - and truly delightful - to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.

As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

Knowing how people will use something is essential.

The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

I look at the world and peer into products and think, 'What's wrong with these products?'

Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.

You launch a site, and you see what works, and you continue to make it better.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

Consumers have zero time for products that are not simple, intuitive, and attractive to use. This is especially true with Internet products, where clean and useful design is a prerequisite to keeping anyone on your site for more than 30 seconds.

What if the Big Three automakers made products that were simple and easy to use - imagine a car with a user interface made by Apple - while also constantly trying to push the state of the art? What if they constantly sought out new technologies and ideas, and incorporated them into their products?

If a whole bunch of users want a specific feature, and we think that feature is pretty cool, too, that that's just what we'll do.

Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.

The major problems facing the development of products that are safer, less prone to error, and easier to use and understand are not technological: they are social and organizational.

Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn't mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable.

For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product.

Simplicity design axiom: The complexity of the information appliance is that of the task, not the tool. The technology is invisible.

Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

Simple and intuitive design is what inspires and drives me.

A design isn't finished until someone is using it.