Success Quote by Jesse James Garrett

A tiny design complaint that doubles as a sly thesis about abstraction: the moment your “user” becomes a Weeble, they stop being human and start being a placeholder you can steamroll. Garrett’s line lands because it’s practical on the surface (round things are annoyingly hard to differentiate in sketches) while quietly indicting the culture of simplification that creeps into business and product work. If everyone in your storyboard looks like an egg, then everyone’s needs blur into one undemanding blob, and that’s convenient.

The joke has teeth because “Weebles” carry a specific cultural residue: toy figures designed to wobble but not fall down. They’re literally engineered for stability. In a business context, that’s the fantasy version of customers and employees - resilient, frictionless, endlessly forgiving. Garrett punctures that fantasy with a drafter’s problem: you can’t draw personality onto a shape built to resist it. The constraint of the form becomes an ethical constraint. When your representation tools can’t capture difference, your decisions start to treat difference as noise.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of certain UX and strategy rituals: personas, journey maps, whiteboard narratives. These are meant to restore empathy, yet they can become aestheticized bureaucracy. “Eggs, not people” is a warning about how quickly human-centered language turns into human-shaped clip art. The intent isn’t to ban cartoons; it’s to insist that if your symbols make everyone interchangeable, your process will, too.