Science Quote by Donald Norman

A quiet rebuke to the fantasy of the “perfect” product, Norman’s line strips design of its most seductive myth: that there’s one ideal interface, chair, app, or dashboard waiting to be discovered by a sufficiently brilliant team. The phrasing is almost understated, but that’s the point. “In my opinion” reads like politeness; the subtext is a scientist’s warning about overconfidence. Design isn’t mathematics with a single correct answer. It’s a negotiation with human variability.

Norman’s context matters: as a cognitive scientist who helped popularize human-centered design, he spent decades watching people “misuse” objects in ways that were actually perfectly rational responses to confusing signals. The quote smuggles in a sharper claim: when a design fails for some users, it’s not just user error, it’s evidence that the designer optimized for a narrow model of a person.

“Optimal” is the loaded word. It invokes engineering rigor, then immediately undermines it by pointing out the denominator problem: optimal for whom, in what setting, with what goals, constraints, bodies, languages, attention spans, and stress levels? The line anticipates today’s debates about accessibility and inclusive design, but it also needles modern product culture’s obsession with one-size-fits-all minimalism. Defaults are political. Every “simple” flow is simple for someone.

Norman isn’t arguing for chaos or infinite customization; he’s arguing for humility, testing, and designs that degrade gracefully across difference. The best designers don’t chase universality. They design for reality.