Science Quote by Donald Norman

User-centered design, in Donald Norman's formulation, is less a slogan than a rebuke. The line is deceptively plain, but it carries a sharp intent: stop treating users as a box to check at the beginning (requirements) and the end (usability testing). Norman is insisting on continuity, on an ongoing relationship between maker and audience that disrupts the traditional hierarchy where experts declare what people need and then ship it downstream.

The phrase "working with" is the quiet ideological pivot. It rejects the extractive posture of "studying" users, as if they were specimens, and replaces it with collaboration. That matters because design failures rarely come from a lack of intelligence; they come from confident isolation. Engineers optimize for what is measurable, stakeholders optimize for what is sellable, and both groups quietly assume people will adapt. Norman, a cognitive scientist who helped popularize the idea that everyday objects should match human mental models, is arguing that adaptation is the wrong direction of travel. The product should bend toward the person, not the other way around.

"All throughout the project" also smuggles in a critique of process theater. Organizations love the performance of empathy: a persona workshop, a few interviews, maybe a sticky-note wall. Norman's demand is operational, not sentimental. If users are present only at milestones, their feedback gets treated as an inconvenience rather than as a design material. Continuous contact forces humility, catches misread assumptions early, and makes the final artifact less of a guess and more of a negotiated fit between intention and lived reality.