I prefer design by experts - by people who know what they are doing. — Don Norman

I prefer design by experts - by people who know what they are doing.

Author: Don Norman

Insight: There's something deeply reassuring about trusting someone who actually knows their craft. We encounter this tension constantly: the temptation to DIY everything versus admitting that some skills take real time to develop. A poorly designed kitchen might work, but an expert one anticipates how you'll actually move through it. A self-taught website functions, but a designer's site guides you intuitively toward what matters. The non-obvious part is that true expertise often looks invisible. You don't notice a well-designed door handle until you've struggled with a badly designed one. This is why Norman's preference matters—amateur design often draws attention to itself through friction and confusion, while expert design dissolves into the background of your experience. It's the difference between something that merely works and something that works so well you stop thinking about it entirely. This doesn't mean experts have all the answers or that experimentation has no value. But there's wisdom in recognizing that some problems benefit from someone who's spent years understanding how people actually behave, not just how things theoretically should work. The best designs don't feel designed at all—they just feel inevitable.