Intuitive Equals Familiar (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Intuitive Equals Familiar (1994)

asktog.com

44 pointsgdubs10 comments

Maybe other terms are better at describing interfaces, like "discoverable" or "consistent".

One nice thing of the first WIMP apps was its discoverability. If you wanted to learn how to use your word processor, you clicked in the icons and navigate the menus. Good apps had related actions in the same menus.

I take the author's point that if something requires a user to undertake extensive training (or at least an extended period of familiarization) in order to become proficient with it, then it is not, and never was, intuitive, and also that the mouse, when introduced, was not familiar. Is not the latter, however, why it is called intuitive instead of familiar? Is it not useful to have a word to describe something that is not familiar, but which, after minimal experience, becomes so? (In this case, on account of taking advantage of many things that are familiar.) If not 'intuitive' (or 'intuitable'), then what? I am not convinced that 'intuitive' is being abused to the point where we should drop it. If the author's customers are confused by the difference between 'familiar' and 'intuitive', conflating them is not going to help.

This reminds me of Von Neumann's quote "Young man, in mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them".

I agree completely with the author's point – beyond a few innate skills that we are born with, what we consider "intuitive" is really just familiarity.

Some things are easier to get familiar with. Culture and innate talent or tendencies can affect that, but that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as good design independent of that.

This is a very good proposition. It should be obvious that we don't have any high-level intuition on how to use computer interfaces - how could we have evolved one?

Besides it frees "intuitive" for some low level meanings that badly need a name. For example, the mapping between the 2D position of the mouse and the 2D position of the cursor is actually intuitive. If we moved the mouse left, but the cursor moved in circles, it would fail our natural expectations.

Too bad this already lost.

"It should be obvious that we don't have any high-level intuition on how to use computer interfaces - how could we have evolved one?"

How could we have evolved <the capability to deal with something new> is a question that applies to everything that's ever evolved since the beginning of time, so the implication must be wrong.

Every new capability is adapted from a different "purpose". That doesn't mean that any new capability is equally feasible.

It irritates me how people observe that smart people say counterintuitive things, so they gravitate towards counterintuitive things as though they were automatically smart. It's a major antipattern in thinking in general.

> How could we have evolved <the capability to deal with something new> is a question that applies to everything that's ever evolved since the beginning of time, so the implication must be wrong.

Ok, you explain me how evolution can trim our species for something that appeared less than a generation ago (and didn't kill a lot of people).

what you are referring to here already has a name, given by Donald Norman: "Natural Mapping"

The only intuitive user interface is a nipple. Everything else has to be learned.

Thank you. This will help me a lot in gaining market share for my product.

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