S60 Open to new features

Years ago I read the phrase “intuitive just means you learned it somewhere else”. I don’t recall who said this and can’t seem to find it — if you know, drop me a note!

One of the most important things to me about designing user interfaces is trying to figure out if an audience of users has already learned something, and where they learned it. “Where they learned it” is important because that may determine whether the users will bring that particular piece of intuition into play in relation to the design.

You usually want your designs to be “intuitive”. If a design is not “intuitive”, designers are told, it’s not a success. In design reviews, “intuitive” is frequently an important criterion. This is generally a pretty good idea; if users can use your design right away without pausing to figure it out first, so much the better.

There are many levels of “intuitive”, though, and these have to do with where you learned something. As humans we have enormous implilcit understanding of mass and gravity; that’s why we can toss a ball accurately (or semi-accurately in my case) and how you know by looking whether to try jumping a certain distance. As inhabitants of high-tech civilization we have a lot of implicit understanding of graphic user interface, and that’s why we don’t expect an object on a screen — in most contexts — to drop to the bottom because it’s “heavy”. In fact, even more than that, we even know that in some contexts, such as certain games, we do expect objects to have mass and react as if there was gravity.

When you see a new user interface, sometimes there’s a little “aha!” moment. Something surprises you, and at the same time seems suddenly obvious. I think that moment represents a realization that you can bring a different intuition into play in a context you already understood in a different way.

Intuitive design is about ease of use. Counterintuitive design — done really well — is about aha.