Edward Tufte Quotes

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.

Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.

I like to see photographs: I like to see my family. To me, when I open a basic browser, and it's that very elegant silver simple user interface, I am unhappy. I don't need elegant and silver and simple!

Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible.

One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.'

For a long time, nobody had figured out Information Architecture, so we all just made stuff up.

Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.

Computers are scary. They're nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.

We're excited about how tech can be used to get tech out of the way.

A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem - how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can't imagine any better preparation for the work I do now.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

There are already a lot of devices in our lives that have rich text or the ability to handle graphics. Our devices are designed to be understood in less than a quarter of a second.

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

Keeping it simple for the consumer is incredibly dire.

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

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.

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can't imagine any other way.

I feel that it's lovely when, as a user, you're not aware of the complexity.

The Internet didn't become usable until Netscape because that gave the average person a user interface that was intuitive, simple, friendly - this made it accessible.

A world-changing vision often necessitates a profound simplicity in the user experience.

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.

Simplicity is key. Some people like really high-tech kitchens, where you have warming drawers and ice makers and storage for a million different things. Honestly, for me, I need an oven, a stove top, a fridge and a sink.