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Am I the only person who hates people using "intuitive" when giving feedback about interface design? It's *completely* meaningless. Heck, this isn't even my design that's being critiqued and the comments make my skin crawl.

"It works well, but it's not very intuitive"

"Can we make this section of the interface more intuitive somehow?"

"I don't think our customers are finding it very intuitive, they're having lots of issues"

If I had my way everyone using the word would be kicked out of the meeting and made to wear an "I'm a moron" t-shirt for the rest of the week, especially the smug arses that act as though they've just said something profound.

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  • 2
    @NoMad "Unfamiliar" I'd take, at least it means something. Same with "unresponsive", "x functionality isn't very discoverable", "y functionality isnt very accessible", etc.

    But yeah, "intuitive" means nothing at all, and when people *do* use it, it turns out they often just mean "but it doesn't look like my facebook and I don't know what to do"...
  • 0
    Intuitive is NOT completely meaningless. When you design a UI, you should at least define a couple of different personas and make sure the UI facilitates them. Then use other methods such as card sorting to establish the most intuitive and logical menu/navigation structure etc. If done properly, users will find your application easy to use with an intuitive UI.
  • 0
    it's not completely meaningless if you know a bit about ux and psychology. it's only very nebulous and it's your job (i assume) to follow up on that to get to a more concrete bit of info that you can act on.
  • 0
    Well this is where your say: "What do you mean by more intuitive?"

    Or: "We have a complex problem. I cannot make the problem go away as this is what we want to solve. This solution solves it. I need to understand the pain-points of our users to get a feeling on where to improve things or if teaching our user-base would suffice here."
  • 0
    @CodeMasterAlex Of course you should define personas. Of course you should do lo-fi testing / prototyping, of course you should revisit and replan your interface based on feedback from that.

    That still doesn't take away from the fact "intuitive" is a useless word in this context. It doesn't even add any meaning to your comment there, beyond the UI being "good".
  • 0
    @k0pernikus @Midnigh-shcode The fact you have to follow it up with no clue what they mean beyond "I'm not happy with this somehow" is a pretty big clue that the information is useless.

    Should clarify that this is in a professional tech environment where the people making these comments should know better. If you were asking for random comments from the general public, I'd agree (I'd also expect it.)
  • 0
    @AlmondSauce "professional tech environment"

    doesn't mean much, not many people in trch environments actually know enough about psychology and ux.

    including those who design interfaces. (notice i didn't call them ui designers, since from my experience, in 98% of cases, they are not.)
  • 0
    @AlmondSauce p. s. information that "it's wrong even though i don't know how or why" is still better than no information at all.
  • 1
    @StefanH You listed 10 examples. Each of those statements is a completely fine criticism and helpful. Hiding behind "unintuitive" as a shortcut and to expect a developer to know what you mean is unfair. Calling people lazy or stupid for not having your experience level is very unproductive.

    You can use that phrase as a starting point. "Your UI is unintuitive because <reasons>." Just the word by itself is meaningless.
  • 0
    ‘It’s good.. but it’s not very intuitive’
    Ie. ‘It’s not how I would have done it’
  • 0
    @StefanH That's all well and good, but without "StefanH's personal manual to what he specifically means by the word unintuitive", how the hell are the rest of us meant to know that it equates to those ten points?
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