Day 55 — Demystify series 3/7: “Intuitive, Easy to Use, Easy to Learn”
When we design a product, should we try to make it intuitive, or easy to learn? What about easy-to-use? What are the differences? Whether you’re a designer, product manager, or developer, it’s important to know which direction we should go with so that it fits users’ needs. In this article, I’m going to help demystify what they are and the best way to set the right direction.
In order to explain in details, this article will follow the structure below:
- Descriptions of these terms
- Examples of the differences
- Optimize with the right direction
Descriptions
- Intuitive often means that a user is able to understand and use a design immediately — that is, without consciously thinking about how to do it.
- Easy to learn is to describe the product/system doesn’t take much effort for users to acquire the knowledge in order to operate/interact with the product/system.
- Easy to use means the user experience in general doesn’t requires lots of effort or mental load to complete the intended task.
Have you noticed the differences in the descriptions above? If you start thinking about a Venn diagram, then you’re very very close. The truth is, a easy-to-use product sometimes doesn’t have the most intuitive interface. It’s also true that a easy-to-learn product might not be the most easy-to-use product. How so? Let’s break down the difference with some examples below.
Examples of the differences
- An intuitive UI example could be the “Like” button or “Star” rating. Without further text description, user can guess what the thumb up icon means because it’s mapping the real life experience of when we’re giving others a thumb up.
- An easy-to-learn product might achieve it’s good learnability through other means than intuitive interface design. For example, a well-designed product tutorial that helps user quickly understand how the system works; or, in every place in the system you navigate to, it has clear indications of where you are, and how to get back to your previous place; furthermore, a clear information hierarchy like a sitemap to show the structure of the system.
- The easy-to-use perspective of a product could be highly subjective to who’s using it. For example, Adobe Photoshop is not hard for professional designers or photographer, but it’s quite difficult for the general public. I remember when I started learning Photoshop 5, it was a brutal experience for me to memorize all the functionalities in the “Toolbox”, and all the layer effects. Same concept could be said about Microsoft Excel, which is also a professional software that aims to satisfy specific needs in the professional space.Also, it is not necessarily the most intuitive product for everyone in the world.
The differences
Some of the interfaces can leverage common icons, established design patterns and components (e.g. drop-down menu) to make it intuitive. If the product requires some light education for users to perform certain task (e.g. drag a file onto an area to upload), a good description of how the system works can make it easy-to-learn. And, easy-to-use product could include both intuitive UI and easy-to-learn design, but sometimes it’s not limited to those two; Especially for professional software the comprise of lots of functionalities, the emphasis of “easy” could be more on the efficiency side rather than the “learning curve” side.
Analogy
Imagine you’re in the movie “Cast Away”, in which you’re drifted to a deserted island all by yourself. You have two choices to get out of the island: 1) A typical canoe, very intuitive of how to use it. Even if you have never rid a canoe, it’s very easy to learn. Or, you can choose: 2) A speedboat that requires you to spend two hours to read the manual and test run in the water. But once you learn it, you can quickly get out of the island, much faster than a canoe. Now, which one would you choose?
Optimize with the right direction
Ideally, it’d be great to be able to design something that’s intuitive, easy-to-learn, and easy-to-use. However, most of the times designers have to strike the right balance based on the type of the product and natures of the target users.
Limitation of making it “intuitive”
Unfortunately, there’s only so much a designer can do to make something intuitive. Why? Because the foundation of being intuitive is to map the experience to something that’s well-established in users mind. That brings up two challenges:
- There is only limited amount of common icons or well-established patterns we can leverage;
- Every user groups could be unique, what is intuitive to group A might not be intuitive to group B. Therefore it’s not always easy to find something that’s intuitive for everyone.
“Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.” ― Steve Krug, “Don’t Make Me Think”
Help user to learn easily
That leads us to the next stage: If we can’t make everything intuitive, what should we do? What we can definitely do is to explain it well to the users. When looking at Nielsen Norman’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, there are lots of good guidelines to help us design an easy-to-learn product. Just to list a few:
- Visibility of system status
- Consistency and standards
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
Reduce the overhead to be easy-to-use
As you’ve seen the example above, in Adobe Photoshop there’s a lot of floating windows with lots of buttons, icons, sliders, etc. It could be overwhelming for an amateur; but once we get a hang of it, it’s very efficient to utilize these tools to get our job done. It allows all sorts of customization to make the layout and tool set suits individual users needs for best efficiency. Also, it allows users to write their own script (computer code) to automate the process to make it even more efficient.
Imagine you’re a aircraft pilot, in an emergency situation you need to lower the landing gear (the wheel and tire). Would you like a 4-steps wizard to teach you how to lower the wheel, or a big button right next to you so that you can quickly press it in an emergency situation?
In general, professional software design aims for efficiency of use. Also a lot of times the real-estate on the screen could be highly competitive. Therefore. reducing the process overhead (e.g. avoid using 3 steps wizard to complete a task) can help professional users thrive in a fast-pace environment.
Pick the right direction
All in all, before jumping into the solution mode, design teams should do enough amount of research to determine target user’s tech savvy level, what are the benchmark product they are familiar with, what’s their typical frustration about system or product they use. By doing so, design teams can generate appropriate design principles as a guideline to optimize the product experience and performance.
Conclusion
- Intuitive Design is the highest goal but is often hard to achieve. There are patterns and module to help create a easy-to-learn product;
- The aspect of “easy-to-use” is highly subjective product by product, user group by user group;
- Design teams need to conduct enough research activities to determine how they can optimize for specific user needs.
When you design/create a product, what do you aim for? How do you balance between all three? I’d love to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
