A Quote by Marshall McLuhan

The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

Marshall McLuhan

Quote Topics

Book Consider Content Electric Electric Light Hammer Interface Language Light Message Metamorphosis Total User

Quote Author

Marshall McLuhan
Canadian - Sociologist
July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

Joel Spolsky

Tribalism isn't a bad thing. If you're a Facebook user, or Twitter user or Foursquare user or LinkedIn user, those are all tribes... and they may even have sub-tribes. It's not pejorative, it's declarative.

Peter Guber

Every day, hundreds of millions of people stab themselves, bleed, and then offer, like a sacrifice, to the glucose monitor they're carrying with them. It's such a bad user interface that even though in the medium-term it's life or death for these people, hundreds of millions of people don't engage in this user interface.

Astro Teller

User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world.

Michael Eisner

It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.

Douglas Coupland

When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.

Howard Rheingold

I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.

Francois-Henri Pinault

To the user, the interface is the product.

Aza Raskin

They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.

Erik Naggum

User interface is customer service for the computer.

Julie Larson-Green

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

Eric Schmidt

The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface.

Ellen Ullman

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

Jeff Bezos

If we continue to treat content as an extra to information architecture, to content management or to anything else, we miss a bright opportunity to influence users. Content is not a nice-to-have extra. Content is a star of the user experience show. Let’s make content shine.

Colleen Jones

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.