When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

– Aza Raskin

The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.

– Jonathan Ive, on designing the iPod [Wired]

Moreover, an API is not about programming, data structures, or algorithms—an API is a user interface, just as much as a GUI. The user at the using end of the API is a programmer—that is, a human being.

– Michi Henning, API Design Matters

[via Jwatt]

A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our “fovea-eye” is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.

– Jürg Nänni

If you’re not embarrassed – in the consumer internet – by the first version of the product you launched, you’ve launched too late.

– Reid Hoffman

AIR apps are like modern day Java applets… sure, they run on every platform. But they also suck on every platform

Loren Brichter

[via Marco]

if you are suggestive of listening to each and every feedback and source ideas for your product from the crowd-controlled opinion market, you’re pretty much in a cul-de-sac.

– thomas marban, indecisive

Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.

Dieter Rams, (cribbed from a pull-quote in Good Design in Ten Commandments) [via ★]

Design isn’t art; it’s practical. Your designed object, including layouts and Web sites, either works or it doesn’t. One way to gauge whether or not it works is through sales. If the public needs reëducation on your design object, it never “worked” in the first place.

– Joe Clark, Special warning to the Krit Kidz

It’s one more reason to kick your project, whatever it is, out of the nest as soon as you can. It’s often the only way to know if it can really fly.

– The moment of truth is a real audience