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Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too | by Patrizia Bertini | Apr, 2026 | UX Collective

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In the year 2000, Steve Krug published three words that became the operating philosophy of a generation of designers: Don’t Make Me Think. The message was radical in its simplicity — technology should work for people, not the other way around. Usability was the revelation. Friction was the enemy. If a user could not complete a task, the product had failed, full stop. Krug gave practitioners the language. Don Norman had already given them the philosophy, twelve years earlier in The Design of Everyday Things — the foundational argument that designed objects should respect the cognitive reality of the human beings using them. Together, these ideas seeded an entire discipline. It was the right idea at the right moment. And it changed everything. I remember that moment clearly. I was starting my career in Italy, working on some of the first accessible digital banking interfaces in the country. The conversation was about the information superhighway and its extraordinary promises. Technology

Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too We spent twenty-five years making technology work for users. Now we need to make it work for human beings. These are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where a generation of harm accumulated. Patrizia Bertini 7 min read · Apr 1, 2026 -- 3 Listen Share In the year 2000, Steve Krug published three words that became the operating philosophy of a generation of designers: Don’t Make Me Think . The message was radical in its simplicity — technology should work for people, not the other way around. Usability was the revelation.

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