Huh? This essay by Don Norman on the surface seems to fly in the face of design/production techniques we've embraced over the past while. After all - doesn't it seem reasonable to do the user study up front to help develop the requirements document so we can build the appropriate structure? Well yes, of course it is, he maintains - but outside the project cycle. Norman opines that perhaps the correct order should be to design/build using rapid, iterative prototyping, and have user studies to perform the "beta testing" - bugfixing, defining enhancements etc.
An interesting argument and maybe one that bears more thought.