The myth of intuitive design
A UX Designer’s quest to help everyone understand everything.
We hear the word intuitive a lot in our industry, from our clients, “the UI should be intuitive;” or perhaps it shows up as a pillar in the creative brief, “the target audience will find the UI intuitive.”
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary consistently refers to its root word, intuition, when defining intuitive; with only one variation specifically related to software, “an intuitive interface.” This outlier which is clearly our client’s intended meaning continues with, “readily learned or understood,” but seems to contradict the broader definition of Intuition which is more like, “quick and ready insight” or my favorite, “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” Or, in other words, by some gut instinct or mystical power.
It would be easy to accuse me of getting caught up in the terminology and ignoring the essence of what is meant by the word intuitive in the context of UX design, but that would be like focusing on just the creative and ignoring the scientific side of user experience. Creatively, we devise solutions that are not readily apparent, which is where many of us live on the design side; but to satisfy the scientific, where a design does not become a solution until it’s been tested and validated, we must have something tangible to evaluate. So if intuitiveness is the benchmark, what exactly are we measuring and how do we measure it?
Patterns of the Past
The word intuitive implies that we could quantify the user’s abilities, maybe their clairvoyance or aptitude for deciphering what is presented to them. I must admit, there were times that I’ve blamed the user when they were unable to understand an arguably vague design that made perfect sense to me. To evaluate the design, we are actually analyzing its familiarity to the user or the legibility of previously established patterns and affordances. Many of the conventional patterns we use today have direct links to the physical world, but their affordances were refined until they made sense digitally. However, in the emerging technology space, traditional UI frameworks are often not available or do not fully accommodate new interaction scenarios.
It’s an exciting time for technology and it looks like the pace of innovation is only accelerating, which will continually change the way our users interact with the digital world. We’re already starting to see where some of these newer technologies are pushing us into realms that do not have a direct correlation to the physical or even a cognitive connection to an easy to understand phenomenon, much less a parallel to a familiar design language. A simplified example of this is trying to create an icon for a specific feature within a virtual construct, like AI or Holographic, without just rendering existing iconography using dotted lines. Icons are effective for taking tangible patterns into the digital world, but now that we are starting to communicate a virtualization of this digital space, it’s worth evaluating how these patterns will hold up to the layers of abstraction inherent in implementing new technology on modern infrastructure.
Another trend that will force us to reevaluate our standard practices is a new generation of designers joining our industry who are less emotionally connected to what we consider hard established rules. Since each generation will have less experience with the physical world equivalencies upon which many of these standards are based, we are about to reach a time where, for some, a design feels symbolic because of its links to the past and for others, the same design is completely abstract. By welcoming their seemingly controversial ideas, we’ll be forced to question the value of perpetuating what we have come to know as standards to those that do not fully understand their references.
Looking toward the future
Unfortunately, we cannot rely upon mystical forces to guide our users through the innovative experiences we create. The idea that the right layout and combination of design elements could produce a clean and efficient presentation of information that anyone can understand is an intriguing challenge, but it always felt like an all or nothing thing. As soon as the user experiences a little friction we compensate by adding “helper” content which causes the once elegant design to become cluttered. At this point we are not designing to the user anymore, we are designing solutions for our design, and as we iterate in frustration, we must admit that our design has literally failed to meet the definition of intuitive. Though it’s a great word for communicating our intentions, should intuitiveness be the ultimate goal?
The barrier to entry for any user is past experience and their ability to translate interaction patterns based on the affordances presented. It can be said, if it’s new or unfamiliar, than it’s not intuitive, but where does that leave us that are working in new technologies?
The reality is, It’s always been OK to teach the user something new. Unfortunately the typical solutions for user on-boarding have been dreadful. It’s like we’ve given up at this point and a tutorial was put in as a last resort or with very little budget left. Even worse, we hold fast to the minimal design direction and send frustrated users to a help menu where we outline all the workarounds for the beautiful interface.
Sometimes we just get so caught up in getting the user into an experience, that we take for granted the magic of discovering new technology or becoming impressed with something common being used in a new and more powerful way. Intuitiveness of design requires there to be an understandable conversation between user and designer; the emergence of inclusive design is evidence enough that our language, in these conversations, was too shallow and narrowly focused on a specific persona.
A design should start by listing out all the expectations we have for the user. There’s often a mismatch in what we assume our users will bring to the table, based on the persona we expect a level of knowledge, past experience, pattern fluency, or workflow understanding. There was a time when we relied on a specific tool or device to accomplish a task, now we can choose from a plethora of apps. Consider how many ways we can capture, enhance, and share photos on our mobile phones. Each of these applications contain unique and innovative interaction patterns based on their specific workflows. Not only will these patterns challenge tried and true standards of the past, but they also increase our bias of what’s intuitive, which is more reliant upon the experiences we have in common.
The Myth Exposed
Now, having exposed this myth, I hope we can begin the design process focused on informing users on how they can use our technology to accomplish their goals. Not through the traditional tutorial that we force everyone through, but by leveraging our years of experience, acquired skills and collective talents to create streamlined and responsive interfaces that go beyond teaching or reminding our users how to interact. Beyond the interface and the persona. Designing systems to detect the experience level of the user, understand the pace that they want to work, and conform to the different modes that are appropriate given the context of the experience and the types of tasks they wish to complete. Instead of relying on the intuition of our users, we should have a deeper conversation with them. Listen not only to the buttons they press, but things like how fast or often they interact, which can provide clues to intent.
As we move into a new era of UX design and technology, focusing on empowering users to have a common understanding instead of assuming they can decipher our design dialect is the safest strategy. Devise ways to measure a user’s comprehension at each step in the user journey, with the understanding that not everyone will want to follow the same work stream. A flexible system for providing information and allowing the user to customize the experience should be the backbone of the design. Though, we should never attempt to outsmart the user, we can use patterns discovered in our user testing to figure out the proper context to unobtrusively offer assistance; producing a more user-centered design and one that might even appear intuitive.
