35 powerful, essential quotes for design leaders
Whether you’re a senior designer or a creative leader in the executive suite, you’re bound to encounter a few common challenges in the user experience design field, from helping your team cut through complexity to advocating for user-centricity.
In these situations, there’s nothing like the magic of a succinct quote. Feeling that someone else from history has had the same conversation you’re having with your team or partners can really validate and strengthen your conviction, not to mention keep you uplifted and inspired. Plus, as a leader, influence is your superpower—and a good quote used properly can enhance your message.
The following list compiles some of the best word bites from a diverse group of authorities, addressing eight general scenarios many face in design. I hope you find them empowering as you navigate your leadership journey.
1. Inspiring Vision and Enabling Risk
“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” — Robert Brault
“Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that what they now love was even a possibility.” — Marty Cagan
“Designers want to solve the whole puzzle and find a system; engineers want to build quickly and incrementally. Incremental improvements to a product are important, but they need to be led by a clear vision. Vision needs to be tied to a solid understanding of customers and the market.” — Aarron Walter
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs
“I like to step into areas where I am afraid. Fear is a sign that I am going in the right direction.” — April Greiman
2. Negotiating Metrics and Measurement
“If a measurement matters at all, it is because it must have some conceivable effect on decisions and behavior.”—Douglas W. Hubbard
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of valuing what we can measure instead of measuring what we truly value. When not properly contextualized, metrics can serve as horse blinders, limiting your field of vision and causing you to miss important signals about how your work may be impacting people.” — Margaret Gould Stewart
“Measurement is not just numbers, but stories.” — Pearl Zhu
3. Supporting Process
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein
“Each design is a proposed business solution — a hypothesis. Your goal is to validate the proposed solution as efficiently as possible by using customer feedback.” — Jeff Gothelf
“The key to great ideas is not having them, it is executing them. And great ideas come from problems. As designers we call problems ‘briefs’ and we call reactions to problems ‘concepts.’” — Kate Moross
“You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.” — Steve Krug
“Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.” —Jakob Nielsen
“We are living in an attention economy. If you don’t deliver a valuable experience and valuable information to your users at every moment, they are going to disengage with you and there are a lot of different options in the marketplace. It is essential you get your user experience right.” — John Romano
“Be purposeful and thoughtful in the choices you make when the options are nearly infinite.” — Michael Bierut
“The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good.’” — Stephen Covey
“Ideas don’t move mountains. Bulldozers do.” — Peter Drucker
4. Driving Simplicity and Clarity
“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” — Steve Jobs
“Mobile does not reward feature richness.” — Fred Wilson
“No matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.” — Alan Cooper
“Rule of thumb for UX: More options, more problems.” — Scott Belsky
“Most companies focus on completing a checklist of features for each product. Unfortunately, a clutter of irrelevant features makes the product harder to use. The whole focus of the development team is on creating all these functions on time, but if those functions are not needed or cannot be used, is timeliness so important?” — Eric Schaffer and Apala Lahiri, from Institutionalization of UX
“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” — Joe Sparano
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.” — John Maeda
“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.” — Don Norman
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hofmann
“Instructions must die.” — Steve Krug
“The little things ARE the big things.” — Yogi Berra
5. Championing User-Centricity
“When we’re trying to put empathy at the core of our organizations, nothing is more powerful than understanding how we’re coming across, and how people are receiving that experience.” — Susan O’Malley
“If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem.” — Steve Jobs
“Asking users to adopt new behaviors or even modify their existing behaviors is very, very hard.” — Khoi Vinh
“UX doesn’t live inside our phones or our websites. We need to step way outside of those devices to understand what people are doing in the real world.” — Matt Hryhorsky
“If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.” — Susan Dray
“If the user can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.” — Susan Dray
“Information is only useful when it can be understood.”—Muriel Cooper
“To be a great designer, you need to look a little deeper into how people think and act.” — Paul Boag
“The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases.” — William Edmund Hick
“The needs of the users should dominate the design of the interface, and the needs of the interface should dominate the design of the rest of the system.” — Don Norman
“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.” — Alan Cooper
“Everything around us has been designed in some way, and all design ultimately produces an emotion because of expectations. When those expectations are met, we experience a positive emotion — when not met, a negative one.” — Miklos Philips
“Most business models have focused on self-interest instead of user experience.” — Tim Cook
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” — Steve Jobs
6. Advocating for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Responsible Innovation
“None of us is as smart as all of us. Keeping your ideas to yourself is detrimental. Diversity of people equals diversity of ideas.” — Denise Jacobs
“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“By solving our own most difficult problems, we’re potentially creating immense value for everyone else.” — Ian Armstrong
“Design is about the betterment of our lives poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally.” — Karim Rashid
“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.” — Nietzche
“Valuing diversity means valuing disagreement. But I know many people (including myself, sometimes) who want to pursue the former while avoiding the latter. Disagreeing may be uncomfortable, but done respectfully it leads to better outcomes.” — Julie Zhou
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“To make a significant change, you have to be willing to think in ‘long time’ — time that goes beyond each of us in our present role, or even the company’s current configuration. To me, it’s about mastering time in all its forms, as an ally — not an enemy.” — Keith Yamashita
“Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should–and must–question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.” — Dieter Rams
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
7. Fostering Feedback and Granting Failure Permission
“Do not seek praise. Seek criticism.” — Paul Arden
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” — Ken Blanchard
“A genius is just a talented person who does his homework.” — Thomas Edision
“You should not fall in love with your ideas too much.” — Oki Sato
“If you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.” — Brené Brown
“People’s dissatisfaction will fester beneath the surface until one day they surprise you with their resignation. And most of the time when that happens, they’re not just quitting your company, they are also quitting you.”― Julie Zhuo
“The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.” — Anthony De Mello
“The sooner we get our ideas out, the sooner we can figure out what revisions should be. Waiting too long to get that feedback is wasteful. We invest too much in the initial design and are less flexible to changes because of the effort we’ve already put in.” — Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden from Lean UX
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of our ignorance.” — John Archibald Wheeler
“There are professional habits and amateur habits. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.” — Steven Pressfield
“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.” — Andrew Grove
“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The hubris born of success leads to undisciplined pursuit of ‘more’ — big, unfounded acquisitions for the sake of growth and bravado, big bets that have no empirical validation behind them, taking outsized risks on your balance sheet, such that so long as nothing goes wrong they accelerate your growth … until something goes wrong. The risk is moving into areas that don’t preserve the core … it’s hubris that we’re great, plus denial of risk and peril.” — Jim Collins
“Study the greats and become greater.” — Michael Jackson
8. Extending Yourself for the Growth of Others
“To me, a leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes.” — Brené Brown
“Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there.” — Kim Scott
“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.” — Fred Rogers
“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“At the end of the day, a resilient organization isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.” ― Julie Zhuo
Therese Mushock leads with deep enthusiasm for the technology times we live in as a people-focused design leader for a large technology company in California. She earned her M.F.A. in Design in 2010 from the Savannah College of Art and Design, co-founded an innovation lab for an enterprise software company and designed the first wearable app to win an Appy® Award. Therese regularly advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion in product development. Follow her on Twitter.
