Get the Sketch file, code and documentation here: tobiasrenstrom.com

Fresh out-of-the-box human beings come with some pretty clever abilities to interpret the world. Abilities that have been learned through evolution rather than through education.

We all understand the world around us by vision, touch, hearing, smell and taste. For interacting with software we mainly use vision, and that can be broken down in to movement, color, spacing and perspective. Sound is important too, but we haven’t seen too many useful implementations just yet, even taking AI in to account.

Animation is probably the most useful technique in a designers’ tool box. When our eyes detect an object moving, we can instantly infer its direction, speed, acceleration, where it’s going and where it went. An item being animated to a trash icon instantly tells us what was deleted, from where and how to find it again in case of a mistake. Color is powerful too. We can distinguish between two otherwise similar objects just by different colored pixels being lit up, and we can instantly find more similar items by a quick visual color-scan.

Spacing and perspective lets us understand that bigger objects might be more important or prominent than another object. Shadows have a similar effect, putting inactive windows in the shadow of the prominent window lets us know where keystrokes and commands will have an effect on Windows and macOS, for example.

There’s more examples like this, direct manipulation and shapes comes to mind, but I think you get were I’m going. Humans fundamentally still understand the world like we did when we were all living in the woods.

It’s kind of like GPUs in computers, offloading complex graphical computations from the CPU, leading to a huge speed-up for the system as a whole. I think we can imagine people having a similar internal chip for understanding the world through our evolutionary instincts, leaving the cognitive part of our brain to deal with other things like decision making. It’s why the first widespread graphical user interface was such a hit back in the day after all. And here’s the good news; we can leverage that so much more in user interface design.

Written text is an example of something that’s not leveraging that GPU. Reading is a learned ability and it requires cognitive power to process. But it’s still one of the first things we as designer put in to wireframes and early mock-ups.

So, the interesting approach I mentioned earlier is this; the next time you start designing something new, try doing the first iterations of your interface without any text at all, and do your best to make that as usable as you can. Only then start filling in the text. Chances are you’ll come up with new ways of expressing things that you otherwise would have just typed out. If an interface could be understood entirely by our instincts, then that would be one helluva intuitive experience. A bit like nature itself.