Alan Cooper

to minimize mouse movement

Even the iPhone—generally the baseline for good user experience on a digital device—doesn’t anticipate that someone might not want to be pestered with a random phone call when he is in the middle of a business meeting that is sitting right there in the iPhone’s own calendar.

Products designed and built to achieve business goals alone will eventually fail; users’ personal goals need to be addressed.

but it really doesn’t address the first question any designer should ask: Why is a user performing an activity, task, action, or operation in the first place?

A general guideline of interaction design that seems to apply particularly well to productivity tools is that good design makes users more effective.

If the task is to enter 5,000 names and addresses into a database, a smoothly functioning data-entry application won’t satisfy the user nearly as much as an automated system that extracts the names from the invoicing system.

We tend to form mental models that are simpler than reality.

One of the most dangerous practices in product development is isolating designers from the users, because doing so eliminates empathic knowledge.

Personas help us understand which tasks are truly important and why, leading to an interface that minimizes necessary tasks (effort) while maximizing return.

It starts with a “day in the life” of the persona using the product, describing high-level product