Human-centered design (HCD), also called user-centered design, differs from traditional design in several respects and its promotion is the main theme of Norman’s work. In contrast to traditional design, which stresses logic, HCD is a design philosophy that puts human needs, capabilities, and behaviors at the fore of the design process.

Norman argues that good design requires understanding psychology and adapting technology to human behaviors, rather than forcing people to change their behaviors to match machines. Good design facilitates communication between people and technology with affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback, and conceptual models. According to Norman, good design is necessarily user-focused: “Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers” (264, emphasis added). Only through an iterative process of observation, testing, and adaptation can designers create user-friendly products.

Traditional design focuses not on users, but on the competition. Norman argues that focusing on what competitors are doing leads to excess. He compares the outcome to an illness, “an insidious disease called ‘featuritis’, with its main symptom being creeping featurism” (258). Companies add new features to their products to emulate their competitors regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do so.