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I'm going to take an extreme position here and say that there is nothing
inherently intuitive about the user interface of any software. Usually, what
people think of as intuitive is in fact nothing of the kind - it is merely
familiar.
I'll illustrate this with an example. Several years ago, my local vicar was
retiring from his parish. Various members of his family were scattered
around the world and I thought he might want to be able to keep in touch
with friends & family by email. So I gave him one of my old computers as a
retirement present, set up as a minimal and simple configuration for doing
email, web browsing and simple letter writing.
I spent some time with him showing him how to use Outlook Express to do
email. His responses and subsequent telephone calls asking for help were a
real education to me. What I had thought of as intuitive in terms of knowing
what to click & where really wasn't obvious to him at all, and I had been
quite mistaken in assuming that it would be. He was highly intelligent, so
it was not a matter of him being fundamentally unable to understand what he
was trying to do.
The reason for my mistake was that I had spent several years messing about
with computers, and so I knew how Windows programs are usually laid out.
Therefore any new program is reasonably familiar to me provided it follows
the same general user-interface design, and so I can find my way about a new
program until I learn how to use it most effectively.
But the vicar wasn't at all familiar with computers, so all these icons &
buttons & menus might have been written in Swahili for all the meaning they
conveyed to him. Sending and receiving emails was a task sufficiently
different from anything he had ever done before that he had no good
reference to guide him. For instance, he was very confused by the fact that
there never seemed to be any email waiting for him when he started OE, but
when he sent a message quite often some new messages would arrive for him.
He hadn't realised, and I hadn't adequately explained, that you need to go
online and check if there is any email waiting on the server, and that it
won't show up in OE unless and until you do that.
Now, you can argue that OE is not intuitive, but I suspect that a similar
story could be found for any other email program, and even for web
interfaces to email programs, and if any class of application can be served
by intuitive software, email is simple enough to be a good candidate.
There is a happy ending to the story. He did gradually get more familiar
with the program, and learned after a while to manage without my assistance.
He emailed me a couple of months ago expressing his gratitude for the
computer. It had finally expired after more than 5 years of sterling service
and he had just replaced it with a new one, and he is still happily mailing
friends & relations all over the world.
In turn, I am extremely grateful to him (and have told him so) for the very
fine lesson the event taught me in terms of ensuring that the user interface
of any software I design is as simple as possible, and relies on looking not
too dissimilar from tasks that the user already knows and understands.
Easy-to-use software is not so because it is intuitive, it is so because it
is familiar and recognisable.
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