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But, I believe that English is an adaptable medium, so its ok with me if we call a design intuitive. Yet, what does it mean, from a design standpoint, when someone desires a design to be intuitive? To answer that question, we first have to look at how people understand the design in the first place. To do that, we need to look at the designs knowledge space.
You can think of an interfaces knowledge space as a continuum which goes from knowing nothing about the interface and to knowing everything someone could possibly know. If youre looking at the wall, the distance from the left represents how much any given user knows about the design. For each user, we call this the current knowledge point. Thats the amount of knowledge they have when they approach the interface. Theres another point thats of interest to us: the target knowlege point. This point represents how much knowledge the user needs to know to accomplish their objective. Every time a specific user tries to complete a specific task, the current knowledge and target knowledge points become very important to us. (Here youll see our wall with sample current and target knowledge points marked off: )
For a given user trying to complete a given task with an interface, there are two points in the knowledge space that interest us most. Current Knowledge represents the knowledge the user has when they first approach the interface to complete the task. Target Knowledge is the knowledge the user needs to accomplish the task. Now, every user will have a different current knowledge point and that point changes as they get more experience. Yet, weve found that, by plotting out different users, we often see very clear clusters bunches of users that share extremely similar current knowledge. Working with users in the middle of several of the most important clusters gives design teams a nice place to start. (Using these clusters can help design teams determine which personas to focus on.)
The space between the Current Knowledge and Target Knowledge points is called The Knowledge Gap. This is the portion of the knowledge space wee most concerned with when wee designing interfaces. Users can complete their objective when current knowledge equals target knowledge. There are two ways this can happen. You can train the user, thereby increasing their current knowledge, until they know everything they need to know. Or, you can reduce the knowledge necessary, by making the interface easier, until target knowledge only requires the information the user already has. In fact, most good design involves both: users are trained (through explanatory text and other devices) while the designer reduces complexity, reducing the gap distance from both directions.
Chances are you guessed the 9 button. As adults, we learn at an early age that the 9 button will get us an outside line when using a business or hotel phone system. This becomes part of our current knowledge as we travel from phone system to phone system. 9 becomes intuitive, though it isnt innate we had to learn it somewhere along the way. Of course, for this hotel, you wouldve been wrong. The designers of this phone felt that the 8 button was a much better choice. How unintuitive could they be? Everybody knows 9 is far more intuitive! Because other people had problems with this, there were little signs all overon the phone, on the wall, on the receiverthat stated you needed to press 8 to get an outside line. I immediately saw these signs and, without really contemplating the design, pressed 8 and the rest of my friends number. The signs made 8 seem intuitive by training me without my even realizing it. They narrowed the gap quickly and without the distraction often associated with learning new things. Had the phone used the 9 button, it wouldve met condition #1. However, since it had the signs for the 8 button and they worked unobtrusively, it met condition #2.
Anyone who has tried to build a tool that reduces target knowledge knows that they take tremendous work to get right. Is making an interface intuitive worth the investment? Not always. For example, 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 processa 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 Amazons customer service center. Amazon doesnt want a lot of phone calls from users. They arent set up to handle the volume of calls and building a complete customer service call center could render their entire operation unprofitable. While its inconvenient to the user, theyd 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. (Were not saying this is the right thing for Amazon to do, but their choice does have some sound logic behind it.)
Putting Context Into Context 01/04/2005 Three Important Benefits of Personas 12/07/2004 Preventing Usability Problems from the Get-go 11/19/2004 The Right Trigger Words 11/15/2004
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