Good design is not “intuitive”
My family and I love to do escape rooms together. It’s great for building collaboration, and we each bring our own skills to the puzzle-solving. My teenager is particularly excellent at visual puzzles; the adults bring other strengths.
Recently, we completed a film noir-themed escape room. The setting was an old-school detective’s office with all the trappings: a wooden desk, a retro-style Rolodex, old books, and a desk phone. A primary part of the game mechanism was finding the correct contacts in the Rolodex and calling them; the recorded voice on the other end of the line provided clues to further the story.
Get that? A desk phone. A rotary desk phone.
My teenager was stumped. “Um… you do that part,” she told me. Even after I showed her how to use the rotary phone, its mechanism didn’t make sense to her. It just wasn’t intuitive.
In my professional discipline — digital product design — we craft digital experiences that are easy for humans to understand and use. Countless job descriptions in my field will have some variation of this job requirement listed prominently:
Create beautiful, intuitive user experiences that align with our brand.
This is a problem. On its own, “intuitive” doesn’t mean anything, and it’s a lazy way to describe what we do. Here’s a few reasons why.
We may have different cultural backgrounds
A former team member of mine went on vacation, and used the “hollow red circle” emoji ⭕ on Slack to indicate she was unavailable.
I think she was using it as an alternative to the “prohibited” symbol: 🚫 or perhaps the “no entry” symbol: ⛔. In her American mind, they meant the same thing — a reasonable thing to think, since they look similar.
Turns out, the “hollow red circle” emoji ⭕ meant something very different to our Japanese colleagues. It meant she was available! That emoji is the equivalent of a checkmark in that frame of reference, so our colleagues were understandably confused when she wasn’t answering their messages.
What was intuitive to my team member wasn’t intuitive to her coworkers.
We may have sensory differences
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the have the most perfect commute into the city ever: a 25-minute ferry ride across the bay. Twice a day, I get to take a mini-cruise, breathe fresh air, and smell saltwater. It’s idyllic.
However, it can be confusing taking the ferry if it’s your first time, especially on the San Francisco side. There are multiple piers with multiple lines, and if you get on the wrong boat you could end up in a very different place than you were hoping for. And some boats, like the Oakland route, even make multiple stops.
It’s important to know which boat to board, and when to get off.
Until recently, the only way passengers could know which boat to board, and at which stop to disembark, was via verbal announcements offered over loudspeakers or by crewmembers and dock workers speaking loudly.
What if…
- you are hard of hearing or deaf?
- you have a sensory disorder that makes it difficult to hear when there’s background noise?
- your hearing is just fine, but you’re listening to music on your headphones?
In any of the above scenarios, you’d likely wind up in a very different place than you were expecting. (Thankfully, the ferry has recently updated their signage to make it more understandable in a broader range of scenarios.)
We may have age differences
My orthodontist sees patients of all ages, but the vast majority are children getting quick braces adjustments. When you arrive, they ask you to check in on a computer. It’s just a monitor with a keyboard.
While I was waiting for a recent appointment, an older teen entered and began by tapping the screen. Then he looked for a mouse and didn’t find one. All he needed to do was type his name on the keyboard and press Enter, but a keyboard-only interaction was completely unintuitive to him.
Technology evolves quickly, as do our interactions with it. Touch gestures are common now, but are relatively new ways of interacting with technology. What’s intuitive to someone in their forties — a keyboard-only interaction, a rotary phone — may not be intuitive to someone who’s accustomed to different interaction patterns.
There is no such thing as “intuitive”
When it comes to digital interaction patterns, calling something “intuitive” is fundamentally lazy. There is no such thing as “intuitive” when it comes to computing; there are only things we have learned, and things we have yet to learn.
Instead, use analytical and precise ways to describe ease of use. A few examples:
- Make sure the interface follows established interaction patterns. For example, does a checkbox behave like other checkboxes on the web do?
- Make sure the interaction pattern is discoverable and learnable without assistance. (Personally, I find the the “force touch” gesture on iPhone indistinguishable from “long press,” and mix them up all the time.)
- Make sure the interaction pattern uses visual grouping so that related information seems related.
These examples are only the beginning; our field has developed many heuristics over the years to assess whether a user will be able to understand and use the thing you’re building.
But fundamentally, referring to a design as “intuitive” isn’t helpful. It doesn’t help us detect potential challenges, or identify what resolution to apply.
Why? Because we don’t all have the same intuition.
