Science Quote by Donald Norman

The line lands with the quiet provocation of someone tired of shiny dashboards and loud “innovation” talk. Donald Norman, a scientist who helped define human-centered design, is pointing at a habit that most institutions avoid: sitting with mistakes long enough to learn from them. Calling error analysis the “sweet spot” reframes failure from an embarrassing afterthought into the most information-dense part of the work. Not success. Not effort. The messy middle where systems reveal what they really are.

The intent is practical: improvement is rarely a matter of inspiration; it’s a matter of diagnosis. Errors are data with teeth. They don’t just indicate that something went wrong; they expose hidden assumptions, mismatched mental models, brittle interfaces, and incentive structures that reward the wrong behavior. Norman’s subtext is that blaming individuals is a dead end. If smart, motivated people keep making similar mistakes, the design is doing the failing. Error analysis becomes a method for shifting from moral judgment (“Who messed up?”) to engineering curiosity (“What conditions made this likely?”).

Context matters because Norman’s worldview comes out of cognitive science and usability: humans are not the problem to be disciplined; they are the reality to be designed for. The phrase “to me” is doing subtle work, too. It’s an invitation to adopt a stance, not a slogan to recite. In an era where organizations fetishize best practices and hide postmortems, Norman is arguing for the unglamorous craft of getting better: treat errors as the most honest feedback loop you’ll ever get.