A framework to make your UIs intuitive to everyone
A step by step guide to creating better designs with the Interaction life cycle.
I have noticed that people use this comment most of the time when they review products or when the designers look for expert feedback. The idea behind intuitive means to many designers is that a system should be self-explanatory when viewed by a user group with a particular problem in a given context. The perspective of looking at something differs from one to another. Humans have different ways of looking at things and conforming them to be true or false. This highly qualitative bias has made designers wonder if there is anything wrong with their features or look and feel of the design. That is why you are unable to find a defined verse for intuitive design.
The intuitive design is more a characteristic part which is created by the interaction with the design. With that in mind, we can say that intuitive design is that when a user sees it, they know exactly what to do. Intuitive design is invisible. Design is intuitive when users can focus on a task at hand without stopping, even for a second. Intuitive designs direct people’s attention to important tasks.
Why we need a framework for intuitive design?
Every product goes through human interaction. Humans have different ways of interacting with products and showing different emotions and behaviors according to their interaction. This emotions are not visible to the designers and will not get proper feedback from the users. A framework will help to
- Standardize the process of creating better UI’s.
- The feedback will be more structured
- The designers will design better
- To stop designers being more defensive on feedback
- Create meaningful conversations with the user
- Stop designers from worrying to have wage feedbacks
How I got this idea? Where did I start?
I love reading. I usually buy books related to design. Once I stumble upon a book called “Intuitive Design” by Everett McKay. In this book, I found this amazing idea about Intuitive Design and I wanted to improve it furthermore. I took the idea of the model and added my own vision of interaction life cycle to make this work.
Creating an interaction life cycle
The interaction life cycle is designed to understand how humans interact with objects. This model will help to understand the basic steps the humans would go through when interacting with objects in the given context. This model will not measure the external entities that create an impact on the emotions and behaviors of humans.
Understanding the key components of measurements for Intuitive design.
- Understandability: The user creates a logical understanding of what he/she should use to get the task done.
- Discoverability: The degree of ease of which the person can find all the elements and the features.
- Affordance: Object’s properties that show the possible actions the user understand how to interact with the object.
- Comprehensibility: How easy for the user to process the text, elements and derive the meaning to a border context.
- Predictability: How successfully a user can foresee the results of an interaction.
- Employability: The user should be able to navigate through the website/app without the fear of penalty or the fear of getting lost.
- Feedback: Communicates a result of an interaction, making it visible and understandable.
- Expectation: Functionality, the UI enables the users to perform an action with the minimum effort.
- Efficiency: The UI enables the users to perform actions with the minimum effort.
- Forgiveness: If the user’s di the wrong action. the correct thing should happen or the user can correct the error with ease.
The framework
Combination of the interaction life cycle and the measuring components has created the framework for creating Intuitive design.
I hope you guys found something interesting that you can use in day-to-day work. I would be very much thankful if you can give me constructive feedback on the framework so I can improve it more.
