Intuitive Design doesn’t exist!
Or finding a better name for a better goal
Client: “Our new design needs to be intuitive!”
Product Owner: “We really need to rework the usability of our application, it isn’t intuitive.”
Designer: “Oh wow! Did you see this new app? This is a really intuitive user interface design!”
You recognize some of those statements? Of course you do! “Intuitive design” is one of the most popular buzz words used everyday by millions of designers. Especially clients have in mind, that “intuitive design” is a measurement for high quality design. If a product is designed that way, a user doesn’t need to learn the handling of it and will love the experience straight away! What a non-sense…
What we think intuitive design is
With the release of Apple’s products intuitive design is heard everywhere. When we talk about intuitive design we have the hopes, that users are able to use a product without any instructions. They understand all functions and its behaviour from the first moment they open the application without any special assistance or experimentation. We have the expectations that intuitive design helps all target people independent of their topic related knowledge base to act fast in an application’s context. Intuitive design is like the “Holy Grale” of the design world, as it might create the most satisfying user experience and reduce frustrations and misoperations to a complete minimum.
But what is “intuitive”? Ironically, when you ask people nobody really seems to know.
Intuition — a definition
Intuition, a phenomenon of the mind, describes the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. Intuition is often interpreted with varied meaning from intuition being glimpses of greater knowledge to only a function of mind;
– Wikipedia
Intuition is a process that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and nonconscious parts of our mind, and also between instinct and reason. The actions seem logical and will be executed naturally, as the person doesn’t need to learn them within a specific context.
If basically intuition or intuitive is describing an ability of the user, how can we say a product is intuitive? An application can only support the user to act more “intuitively”, but saying a product is intuitive is simply wrong.
From “intuitive” to “recognizable” design
As mentioned in the section above, when we talk about intuitive design we always have Apple with their products in mind, which set new standards in the design world with their OS. In the beginning Apple tried to eliminate misoperations by the use of skeumorphic design. By adapting the visual appearance and behaviour of real world objects in the digital context, people understood easily, that buttons can be pressed or pages be flipped. So is “intuitive” just another fancy word for affordance? I think it is a way more than that.
Today gestures like “pinch to zoom” or “swipes” are regarded as intuitive user inputs. Now the interaction patterns got invisible, there is no paper texture guiding me to the right use and still people keep saying: “Damn, this is intuitive!”
To be honest the first time I hold an iPhone in my hands, I didn’t know some of these gestures. I played around with the device until I’ve discovered some randomly. So according to the above definition in first place these interactions weren’t intuitive for me as I needed to discover them over time. But once discovered, they were so simple to understand, that they stick to my mind completely. To describe this type of design more precise the term I use is “recognizable” design.
To me recognizable design is a design, that the user needs to learn in first place. With the help of a well-crafted user interface or some decent instructions these interactions are easy to discover and provide a good user experience during their progress. Once discovered the interaction is so catchy, that it might feel natural for the user to follow and use it in the future.
Why the naming counts — Stop playing God!
So why did I write this article? Changing the naming of “intuitive” to ”recognizable” doesn’t revolutionize anything. Yeah, that’s completely right. But thinking about “recognizable design” shifts the aspect of your result and redefines the goal during your design iterations.
When you try to design interaction patterns, that are easy to remember and easy to grasp it completely takes the pressure out of your design work. Now you don’t have the goal in mind to design a product or function, that is so intuitive that no person will every need to learn it. It doesn’t need be designed striking and also instructions are no bad thing.
Instead you design something, that is precise and fun to use, so it will be recognizable by the user. With this little tweak the goal finally gets tangible and realistic! It takes the pressure and let you focus and validate your results more easily and rational!
Start offering “recognizable” design to your clients today! I already started doing it and it feels great!
Thanks for reading! Please give me a shoutout on Twitter if you have any questions, if you have ideas for future topics you would love to see or simply liked what you have just read.
