Some of the points in this article are correct (e.g. UCD isn't applicable to every single design decision), but the main thesis depends on a couple of false ass

Some of the points in this article are correct (e.g. UCD isn't applicable to every single design decision), but the main thesis depends on a couple of false assumptions. He asks, "Which of the following ways would you think gave you the most valuable feedback?" He submits that almost everyone would agree the real hammer will provide more valuable feedback than the paper or foam ones. This part is true. The next statement is false. He states that UCD practitioners would have chosen differently had the product been a web site instead of a hammer. They would have chosen the paper prototype, he says. That's just not true. UCD advocates the use of paper prototypes, not because they provide more valuable feedback, but because they are much easier to build. This means that you can test more of them in a shorter period of time. That's a very important distinction. His graph of the UCD process essentially depicts it as a waterfall process, where there are several design steps with big Implement and Deploy steps at the end. That's also usually far from the truth. UCD is very iterative and, if done correctly, involves launching early and using data from real-world usage at each iteration. It's easy to criticize something if you fabricate its weaknesses. The title of this post is pretty ironic.