Whenever the design of user interfaces comes up, one quality is almost always mentioned: it should be intuitive. What does “intuitive” mean here?

The User Is On Their Own | selfaware soup

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2024-05-02 08:30:03

Whenever the design of user interfaces comes up, one quality is almost always mentioned: it should be intuitive. What does “intuitive” mean here? Easy to learn from the ground up? Difficult to make mistakes with? Simple? Maybe any combination of these and more.

If I had to summarize or define this vague requirement of “intuitive”, I’d probably say somethings like “a person using this thing should be able to work it out with reasonable effort”. What is reasonable effort is would depend on the task. Figuring out how to post a photo to Instagram should require very little cognitive thought while working out how to do your taxes by yourself, even if the process is really well-designed and optimized can take some time and work simply because there’s a lot more variables in that case. Unless bot hare literally 100% automated, these two things are just not going to be on the same level of required effort, no matter what.

When are things not intuitive? I’d say when you need someone to explain them to you because within that window of reasonable time and effort you weren’t able to work it out on your own.