Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the terminology used in certain industries, highlighting a dehumanizing aspect of how they view their customers.
Edward Tufte's quote points out that only two industries, namely technology and drugs, classify their customers or clients as 'users'. This observation invites reflection on the way these industries may perceive individuals more as tools to be utilized rather than as people with their own needs and experiences, suggesting a potential disconnection in the relationship between service providers and consumers.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about ethical business practices, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of viewing customers as individuals.
More from Edward Tufte
All quotes βI have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world...plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera.
There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.
The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.
PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.
If youβre told what to look for, you canβt see anything else.
Similar quotes
If we do not learn to eliminate waste and to be more productive and more efficient in the ways we use energy, then we will fall short of this goal [for the Nation to derive 20 percent of all the energy we use from the Sun, by 2000]. But if we use our technological imagination, if we can work together to harness the light of the Sun, the power of the wind, and the strength of rushing streams, then we will succeed.
Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Technology is going to revolutionize almost every sector, leading to the demise of many traditional professions. Economic and political power will be determined less by a country's size than by its technological superiority.
There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.
EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.