Making Designs Seem Intuitive
The biggest challenge in making a design seem intuitive to users is learning where the current and target knowledge points are. What do users already know and what do they need to know? To build intuitive interfaces, answering these two questions is critical.
For identifying the user’s current knowledge, we favor field studies. Watching potential users, in their own environments, working with their normal set of tools, and facing their daily challenges, gives us tremendous insight in what knowledge they will have and where the upper bounds are. Teams receive a wealth of valuable information with every site visit.
For identifying necessary target knowledge for important tasks, usability testing is a favorite technique of ours. When we sit users in front of a design, the knowledge gap becomes instantly visible.
Amazon makes the process of returning a purchased product fairly intuitive. Once a user finds the (sometimes hidden) magic button on the order form, they have no trouble going through the return process—a multi-step wizard which asks intelligent questions and guides the user through the process of printing a shipping label, determining the shipping costs, and returning the product.
However, in our studies, users have much more difficulty finding a phone number to call Amazon’s customer service center. Amazon doesn’t want a lot of phone calls from users. They aren’t set up to handle the volume of calls and building a complete customer service call center could render their entire operation unprofitable. While it’s inconvenient to the user, they’d rather handle the problems through email, which is far more cost effective.
The designers at Amazon have deliberately made the process of calling them very unintuitive to encourage customers to find another way to resolve their problems.
Understanding How Intuitive Works
Once you understand how ‘intuitive’ works—what makes someone perceive a design to be intuitive—it becomes easier to make the decision as to whether an intuitive design is worth the extra effort. The knowledge your users have when they arrive at the design (current knowledge), what knowledge they’ll need to complete their tasks (target knowledge), and what the design needs to do to help them complete the task (the gap) are the key ingredients for making an interface that seems ‘intuitive’ to your users.
http://www.uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/
