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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was pretty straightforward:

> I don't believe there is any such thing as intuitive interfaces, only familiar interfaces.

You read so much about "intuitive" UI/UX design. It's in the article's title, after all. All based to some degree on what interactions come naturally to humans. I don't think much does come naturally beyond a very basic level, and after that it's purely to do with familiarity. So rather than focusing on some hypothetical universal intuition, focus on what your target audience is familiar with.

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But familiar = intuitive. You are just splitting hairs. Obviously what’s intuitive is intuitive largely because it’s familiar (mixed in with a bit of psychology and perception) but that’s not really an issue at all.

Rigid adherence to guidelines isn’t a good idea, obviously, and there aren’t any universal truths and all of that is good to know but at first it doesn’t really get you anywhere, besides being obvious.

Whenever human brains are involved it gets complex and no hard and fast rules exist.

Familiar = you've used it already and know how it operates.

Intuitive = it's new to you, but it's function is based on something you know and lesrning this requires very little of you.

That’s not really how humans work and not really how brains work.

Nothing is technically intuitive and in that regard I do agree with you but I think you are missing the forest for the trees. Everything humans ever do happens within a certain context. There is no fleeing that. And you can call interfaces respecting that context familiar but it also wouldn’t be wrong to call that intuitive.

In that way the distinction you are making up is a very gradual and almost completely meaningless one.

I’m not married to keeping on using the word “intuitive” but I do think it’s also not wrong to use it and especially shouldn’t be followed up by pithy, meaningless (= don’t tell you anything new) dismissals because of that word use.

I disagree - I think the importance of the distinction is that familiar interfaces work better than new, novel interfaces that supposedly tap into some deeper human psycology.

for example, using the scrollbars in the browser chrome provided by the operating system are better than hiding them and implemnting some custom "intuitive" scrolling mechanism.

In my opinion, the use of the work "intuitive" in UI design is a misnomer, when the designer actually means "subjective to me the designer"

What are you on about? I don’t get it.

The intuitiveness of an interface is an empirical question. Whether it works or not is not some subjective fact.

The Venn Diagramm for “intuitive” definitely includes “familiar”, it’s just a more generic term where other factors except familiarity can also play a role.

Do you have any examples of someone pushing for something completely novel and unfamiliar under the banner of intuitiveness? That seems like something that doesn’t happen.

Your viewpoint on this just seems wholly weird and just doesn’t ring true at all. People abusing the term “intuitive” doesn’t make it useless.

(Plus, just for a moment going back to the article: This article does not argue for custom scroll bars or anything even remotely similar to that.)

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