“What Makes a Design Intuitive?”

Last night I attended Refresh Boston’s (LINK) presentation on intuitive design, featuring keynote speaker Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering (UIE). (LINK) Jared asked the central question “What Makes a Design Intuitive?” and proceeded to illuminate his audience with humor and clear examples of things that are (and are not) intuitive.

My illustrative (expanded) version of the take-away is here. For those of you who prefer the get-to-the-point version, here are the key points:

• Designs can’t be intuitive. People either do or do not intuit what the design is supposed to do..
  It’s not about novelty or simplicity.
• The designer’s job is to build an interface that minimizes the gap between what we already know, and what we need to know to use the design.
• We call a design ‘intuitive’ when those two things are equal.
• Cost is the primary reason why we don’t see better designs.
• Crowd sourcing and in-house development are two very different ways to develop products. Each comes with its own peculiar nature of customer interaction, which significantly shapes the outcome of the design.

The longer version isn’t that long, and heck…it even includes the video of Neo learning kung fu. So click over and check it out.

Have fun.