As an old-school UX nerd and enthusiastic participant in the Nielsen Norman Group Certification (yes, I was very proud of my badge), I was genuinely excited for Don Norman’s latest book. I pre-ordered Design for a Better World and started reading it to my 7-year-old son at bedtime—a rare quiet moment for me, and a very effective lights-out strategy for him.
As expected from Norman, it isn’t a typical design treatise. It doesn’t focus on trends, frameworks, or aesthetics. Instead, it challenges designers to expand their responsibility—to move beyond products and pixels, and into systems, ethics, and long-term thinking.
Norman opens with a powerful reminder: everything around us is human-made. Buildings, forms, interfaces, policies, processes—none of it is inevitable, and all of it is designable. That means everything can be reimagined—and redesigned—with intention. It’s the kind of thinking that excites me most about both the macro and micro levels of our work as designers.
In my work designing enterprise systems, I’ve seen how UX decisions ripple far beyond a single screen. A confusing dashboard can cost someone hours of lost time. An inaccessible kitchen display can slow down an entire stadium. A feature released without consideration can introduce friction into someone’s daily routine—not because it was malicious, but because it lacked thoughtfulness.
Norman argues that good design isn’t just about usability—it’s about humanity. About being stewards of clarity, systems, and trust in a world that increasingly automates, abstracts, and overwhelms.
He reinforces these ideas not only in the book, but also in a companion YouTube series where he outlines some of the most urgent and inspiring challenges designers can help solve. One of my favorite frameworks from the series is his call for designers to embrace their “superpowers”—our ability to shape human behavior, steer systems toward sustainability, and build with intention across disciplines.
He also lays out five core principles of humanity-centered design:
- Solve root causes, not just symptoms
- Consider entire ecosystems—people, environment, and society
- Use a long-term, systems-level perspective
- Continuously test and adapt with real-world feedback
- Design with communities, not for them
It’s a powerful reframing of the role design can—and should—play in the world. He illustrates these points through compelling real-world examples:
- The design of electric vehicle chargers, where inconsistent UI patterns across brands make something as simple as “plugging in” an exercise in frustration—and missed opportunity.
- Disaster relief technologies that fail to account for local infrastructure or language, rendering expensive systems ineffective at the moment they’re needed most.
- The lack of repairability in consumer electronics, which locks users out of sustainable practices and contributes to environmental waste.
Each example is a reminder that good design has the power to shape better systems—and better outcomes (as well as the inverse, unfortunately).
An example of this that stuck with me was the initial COVID-19 vaccine rollout. At a moment of global urgency, when access to life-saving vaccines was paramount, many early recipients—often elderly individuals—were forced to navigate confusing, inaccessible online appointment systems. It was a striking example of how poor UX can deepen inequity and add friction in moments when clarity and compassion are most needed. Norman’s call for designers to anticipate context and vulnerability couldn’t feel more timely.
But there’s hope in this too—because design can do better. And in my years of working with designers—people deeply rooted in user understanding, research, and creativity—I rarely meet anyone who doesn’t want to do better. But doing better takes a critical eye—and the ability to zoom out and see how even small design decisions can cascade through complex systems.
Thoughtful UX is responsible UX. It’s grounded in empathy, but informed by constraint. It respects people’s time, environments, and cognitive load. It chooses coherence over novelty. It values interpretability over control.
In Design for a Better World, Norman asks us to stop optimizing only for engagement and efficiency, and start designing for long-term benefit and shared understanding. That message feels even more relevant as we integrate AI into the tools we design.
The future of design isn’t just about what we can build. It’s about what we choose to build—and how we ensure the systems we shape reflect the people we serve.
And that begins, always, with thoughtful, principled UX.
