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Dan Russell has an excellent post on one of my favorite blogs, Creating Passionate Users, about using intuition to create, well, intuitive interfaces.The following is a great excerpt:

Great user interfaces might spring from an intuitive understanding, but they’re crafted by hard work; honed by carefully removing everything that doesn’t add to the tool’s value, deleting anything that gets in the way, or whatever it is that causes confusion.

Creating Passionate Users: Intuition

He makes a good claim that the most intuitive interface disappears while the user concentrates on using the tool you have provided. I really like this mentality, in web apps.

There is a fallback though, if your interface ‘disappears’, because often times your interface, be it the left or right side, holds your application together giving it meaning and value.

I think intuitiveness starts at design patterns and ends with usability. By using standard design principles you are gauranteed a majority of users will be able to ‘use’ your application. For instance, people are very familiar to a toolbar running across the top of a window, a hierarchical navigational pane on the left, and main content in the center-right.

The drawback of design standards is a lack of innovation, especially in a relatively young industry like web / application design. At functioning form there has been somewhat of a debate on design patterns because it does limit innovation, because who says your new design will not be the next standard? To this I say use innovation in a way to add to the experience.

Try sitting a potential user down in front of a screen with your interface on display. Provide no keyboard or mouse. And ask them if it looks familiar. Ask them if they understand what is layed out in front of them. Then give them a keyboard/mouse and see if they do what you expected them to. Chances are if they ‘know’ the layout than they will ‘know’ how to use it. That’s intuitive, and that’s usability.

I agree with Dan - don’t rely on your own intuition. Let the users decide. And yes, remove anything that does not create value because all it creates is confusion.

FYI — This is my first post using the new Flock release.

technorati tags:web+design, user+interface, design+standards

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