Here are few places i like to go to in Zurich. The map below eventually will show all of them in one map. Each place has a separate link to Google Maps though. See below for general info like tipping & smoking

Food

Ooki

Japanese Noodles

Great soups and has also a few non-soup items like curries (i recommend Catsu Curry) and starters like gyoza and soft tofu.

Address:
Bäckerstrasse 39
8004 Zurich
Ooki Website | Ooki on Google Maps

El Lokal

Swiss & French Cuisine

Great place to eat lunch & dinner or to go for drinks, live music in the evenings. Awesome decor with a gigantic skeleton overseeing the whole place. Check the website for the current shows.

Address:
Gessneralle 11
8004 Zurich
El Lokal Website | El Lokal on Google Maps

Les Halles

French Cuisine

Awesome atmosphere set in an industrial trash deco, great kitchen, especially moules & frites from september to february.

Address:
Pfingstweidstrasse 6
8005 Zurich
Les Halles Website | Les Halles on Google Maps

Maison Blunt

Moroccan food and tea room

Outstanding place. So great, that I went to celebrate my wedding there. They serve excellent mezze plates and other oriental specialities as couscous or tagine.

Address:
Gasometerstrasse 5
8005 Zurich
Maison Blunt Website | Maison Blunt on Google Maps

Samurai

Japanese specialities

Best sushi place in town. More expensive than other places but totally worth every penny. Huge variety of sushi but also noodles and soups. The place is run by Japanese staff only and has to a big part Asian clients which is always a good sign for Japanese places.

Address:
Weststrasse 180
8003 Zurich
Samurai Website | Samurai on Google Maps

Cinque

Italian cuisine

Great food in a lovingly decorated restaurant.

Address:
Langstrasse 215
8005 Zurich
Cinque Website | Cinquei on Google Maps

Lily’s

Panasian cuisine

Asian classics for an urban crowd: curries, noodles fried rice etc.

Address:
Langstrasse 197
8005 Zurich
Lily’s Website | Lily’s on Google Maps

Zum Guten Glück

Pancakes

They serve a wide variety of pancakes, salty and sweet, but also have daily menues. This place probably has the heaviest counter in town: it’s made of massive tin!

Address:
Stationsstrasse 7
8003 Zurich
Zum Guten Glück Website | Zum Guten Glück on Google Maps

Italia

Italian cuisine (surprise, surprise)

Limited but awesome menu with not so usual Italian dishes like Luganighe (pork sausage and lentils) or quail.
Try the fennel & parmesan carpaccio as a great starter.

Address:
Zeughausstrasse 61
8004 Zurich
Italia Website | Italia on Google Maps

Grottino 77

Pizza and Italian cuisine

Totally unhip and the opposite of cool but with the best pizza. Perfect dough with fresh ingredients.

Address:
Aemtlerstrasse 11
8003 Zurich
Grottino 77 Website | Grottino 77 on Google Maps

Don Leone

Italian cuisine

Great standard Italian dishes, very decent pizza. Awesome meat dishes. Has a very lively atmosphere.

Address:
Bäckerstrasse 31
8004 Zurich
Don Leone Website | Don Leone on Google Maps

Piccolo Giardino

Mainly Swiss cuisine

There are usually 3 or 4 dishes for lunch with a daily changing menu. Very reasonable prices for good food. Drinks & tapas in the evening. On Sundays they serve the legendary Giardino Burgers.

Address:
Schöneggplatz 9
8004 Zurich
Piccolo Giardino Website | Piccolo Giardino on Google Maps

Yooji’s

Sushi

Affordable & good sushi, not as exotic or authentic as Samurai but really worth it.

Address:
Josefstrasse 112
8005 Zurich
Yooji’s Website | Yooji’s on Google Maps

Coffee

Sisu

Cozy place run by 3 lovely Finns – frankly the best coffee place here.

Address:
Meinrad-Lienertstrasse 1
8003 Zurich
Sisu Website | Sisu on Google Maps

Kafi Schnaps

Beautiful place situated in an old butcher store.

Address:
Kornhausstrasse 57
8037 Zurich
Kafi Schnaps Website | Kafi Schnaps on Google Maps

Dini Mueter

Great coffee, great atmosphere.

Address:
Langstrasse 10
8004 Zurich
Dini Mueter Website | Dini Mueter on Google Maps

Caredda

This is your 100% Italian café and pastry place. And the pastry is awesome. Try aragoste and sfogliatelle.

Address:
Josefstrasse 119
8005 Zurich
Caredda Website | Caredda on Google Maps

Café Mohrenkopf

This place with a beautiful interior is named after its main speciality “Mohrenkopf” which is beaten eggwhite & sugar covered in chocolate.

Address:
Niederdorfstrasse 31
8001 Zurich
Café Mohrenkopf Website | Café Mohrenkopf on Google Maps

Piazza

Situated at Idaplatz in the heart of trending Wiedikon this is a great place to have your coffee outside.

Address:
Idaplatz 2
8003 Zurich
Piazza Website | Piazza on Google Maps

Drinks

Bar 63

Cozy atmosphere and a great drinklist make Bar 63 one of my favourites. Their rum drinks are an absolute must.

Address:
Rolandstrasse 19
8004 Zurich
Bar 63 Website | Bar 63 on Google Maps

Xenix

The tiny bar of the Xenix cinema becomes one of the most popular places to go for drinks in summer since it hast a vast area outside.

Address:
Kanzleistrasse 52
8004 Zurich
Xenix Website | Xenix on Google Maps

General Info:

Tipping

For smaller amounts coffee, drinks round up to whole francs: 3.70 becomes 4.- etc
For larger amounts apply the 10% rule.
In many places you’ll pay at the table to the waiter directly: the waiter will tell you how much it costs and you will tell him the sum plus tip. if you get a bill on a plate, lay the tip on the plate after receiving the change.
At some places you’ll pay at the counter where there is a tip jar.

Smoking

There is a general non-smoking policy in Zurich, some places have additional fumoirs. If not, smokers will have to smoke outside.

Recently I started noticing blog posts that were dismissing Use Centered Design as futile waste of time, assuming that users were incapable to help bring forth innovation and would only lead to sameness. In this post I will look at one specific bashing phenomenon: Proving a point by vague quotes.

Random quoting sprees

If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’
Henry Ford, apparently

If you follow any User Experience or Design Blogs you may have noticed this quote being mentioned over and over. Another quote you might have come across is of an unnamed Apple employee stating:

At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.” [1]

These quotes in their core are used for a very similar purpose: to establish a notion of the inventor that has no need to do any customer-research in order to come up with innovative products. To put it in the words of Jens Martin Skibsted:

The best brands are all guided by a clear vision for the world, a unique set of values, and a culture that makes them truly unique and that no user insights could ever change.

I would not have a problem with the quotes, were they not so irritatingly… irritating. The first is distorted and the second is so unspecific it is hard to take serious.

Ford’s Myth
Especially the Henry Ford quote looks as if no one ever cared to verify its origin and accuracy. It seems to be a colossal misunderstanding – Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. A quick and very trivial look at Wikipedia’s Article on Henry Ford shows:

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. Indeed, he began as a race driver of other people’s cars. As Ford himself noted, by the 1870s, the notion of a “horseless carriage was a common idea”. He was, however, more influential than any other single person in changing the paradigm of the automobile from a very expensive, heavy, hand-built toy for rich people into a lightweight, reliable, affordable, mass-produced mode of transportation for working-class people.

He didn’t even invent the assembly line, for that matter. Strangely enough this quote seems to only appear in the context of new product development – I could not find any proof of its actual authenticity. If you find it, please come forward.

Apple-Fanboys get your facts straight
As for the Apple quote: Might be true, might also be hearsay, misinterpretation or myth. Frankly it doesn’t matter: The quote is very non-specific and Apple’s areas of design are so vast that it is almost negligence not to think of Apple as a User Centered Design company to at least some extent.

The whole discussion boils down to two things:

1. Wrong use of Terminology
Research types are chronically getting confused. Market research and design-research are not the same. As obvious as it sound: whenever I read about Apple not making any user research I always double check if they really mean user research and not market research. It is surprising since the two things have completely different goals and research methods. The same applies to User Centered Design: they might actually be talking about User Lead Innovation.

2. Markets not being distinguished.
Consumer Products are different than niche products. If you are designing something like medical equipment, chainsaws or the interface for a bank’s middle-office transaction system, instinct and artistic intuition will get you only half way – if you’re really experienced. But unless you have a really deep understanding of that very specific target group you’ll probably want to talk to the people that are supposed to be using your products.

This is where Apple’s advantages are: it designs for the masses. The tasks at hand are common and familiar to an extremely wide range of people, designers included. Products that solve your problem are different than those that solve someone else’s problem. They’re definitely not easier – but the form of research is surely different.

The Genius Method

As far as the UCD bashings are concerned: It looks very much as if they rely on the genius element: Apple indeed looks like it’s taking an approach for its product development that looks much like the “genius method” as defined by the folks at identitymine in a post on UCD vs. the Genius Method:

The Genius Method is inspiration-based – it relies on the visual design and user experience teams to make decisions based on their intuition, experience and expertise without significant external input. The Genius Method is certainly the more romantic of the two – it implies that creative geniuses are at play inventing delightful experiences that surpass convention.
identitymine

You have a deep understanding of your end users’ ultimate goals. Sometimes though you are your user. “Scratch your own Itch” is the essential advice in Jason Fried’s and David heinemeier’s awesome Book “Re-Work“.  A belief shared by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper – He based Instapaper on what he thought would do the job best for himself. He also has a very clear view on letting users steer product decisions:

If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.
marco.org

Apple allegedly does not do any Market research. Besides from sometimes delivering Products lacking basic features that users dearly miss and would appear in later versions of the product (e.g. MMS for the iPhone and others) they have been doing rather well in the last few years.

Apple’s success is based on a strict design driven philosophy. The possibility that Apple does not do any market research does not mean that Apple is not User Centered in its design philosophy: Every inch of it is. They have been focused on that for decades and this pays off in the sense that they do not have to re-invent the wheel each time they come up with something new. Apple’s most notorious proof for this are its Human Interface Guidelines. In the Introduction to the HIG developers are urged to follow the guidelines and the first three reasons for doing so are all about users: Users will learn your application faster if the interface looks and behaves like applications they’re already familiar with. Users can accomplish their tasks quickly, because well-designed applications don’t get in the user’s way. Users with special needs will find your product more accessible.
From Time to time Apple introduces new user interaction patterns, this is done with much care and is a sound evolution of the existing, never an erratic reinvention.

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Apple ikea post:
[1] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663220/user-led-innovation-cant-create-breakthroughs-just-ask-apple-and-ikea