Musings on design & other stuff jen's place

It started like this ... a question came across an email list on usability: what makes a design intuitive?

After many other people responded, I took a stab at it:

So here is the nut of the problem, as I see it. Prior knowledge varies from human to human and culture to culture. The things that don't vary across cultures, the physiological bits of sensory perception, like how a sound reaches our ear drum or how color is received by the cones in our eyes don't help us a lot with design, except for things like size, contrast, and color choices that are limited to red & green for fine discrimination versus blue for peripheral vision. Other things that we could count on across cultural boundaries include the Gestalt laws of proximity, closure, continuation, and similarity.

So, understanding what works (and doesn't) at the level of human sensory perception should be codified in our visual style guides (or smell, if you're designing for a puppy :) . Beyond that, the next level is culture, then the user groups that we are used to designing for. We need to view the intuitive-ness of a thing as having layers of effectiveness (pardon my text pyramid) -- there's some magic point between User Group and Individual that we are always striving to design for.

       
                    /\
                   /  \
                 /      \
                /        \
              / Individual \
             /--------------\
            /   User Group   \
           /------------------\
          /      Culture       \
         /----------------------\
        /Human Sensory Perception\   <- or species, in the case of the puppy
       ---------------------------

There's also a modified Maslow's hierarchy in the paper on individuation by Hancock, et al (Hedonomics: The power of positive and pleasurable ergonomics. Ergonomics In Design.) At the bottom is pain avoidance, and at the top is individuation (personal perfection). In between are functional, usable, and pleasurable.

Later in my discussions with Jen, I added another layer, Context, in the middle, so my hierarchy now looked like this:

But what does this model have to do with creating intuitive and innovative designs? That's what I'll discuss in subsequent blog posts.