![]() With the program running, I pointed to the mouse, said it was "a mouse", and that one used it to operate the program. My subject was an intelligent, computer-literate, university-trained teacher visiting from Finland who had not seen a mouse or any advertising or literature about it. This cold description does not express the delight most people find in running The Manhole program, but that is not relevant here. Clicking on certain places yields a new screen. Clicking consists of moving the cursor to some location on the screen by moving the mouse on a surface and momentarily pressing the only button on the mouse. I loaded a childrens program, The Manhole, where user interaction is strictly (and cleverly) limited to "clicking" on various places on an image. Or is it? I performed a deliberate experiment some years ago using one of the early Apple Macintosh computers. " The audience laughs at his mistake.īut that is just the whimsy of a screenwriter. He picks up the mouse, bringing it to his mouth as if it were a microphone, and says: "Computer. In one of the Star Trek series of science fiction movies, the space ships engineer has been brought back into our time, where (when) he walks up to a Macintosh. It has been claimed that the use of a computers mouse is intuitive. Many claims of intuitiveness, when examined, fail. This is a strong clue as to the meaning of "intuitive." When the tools had been learned, he is saying, they became intuitive. What Oppenheimer is discussing is not intuition, but learning. In the usual sense of the word, something cannot become intuitive over time, it is either intuitive or it is not. ![]() 67), speaking of a new aircraft navigation device, "Like anything, it can be learned, but it would take a lot of experience to do it intuitively." These uses of the term are uncharacteristic in that immediacy is normally an important aspect of "intuition". Stephen Oppenheimer, of the Review Board of InfoWorld magazine, noted in his review of Mathcad 4.0 that "The editing tools become increasingly intuitive over time." Similarly, Richard Collins in Flying (October 1994 pg. There are occasional hints of the meaning of "intuitive" in the literature. ![]() "Intuitiveness" in this context is considered to be a function of percentage of tasks completed and the number of help references made while in the very early stages of using a product. Given these connotations, it is as uncomfortable a term in formal HCI studies as it is a common one in non-technical publications and in informal conversation about interfaces.Īs I learned from a talk given by Martin Marshall in Palo Alto (at the May ∙4 Ba圜HI meeting), a number of commercial magazine-related "usability" labs that rate software qualities give 50% of their weighting to User Satisfaction, 30% to Productivity, and 20% to Intuitiveness. In common parlance, intuition has the additional flavor of a nearly supernatural ability humans possess in varying degrees. The impression that the phrase "this interface feature is intuitive" leaves is that the interface works the way the user does, that normal human "intuition" suffices to use it, that neither training nor rational thought is necessary, and that it will feel "natural." We are said to "intuit" a concept when we seem to suddenly understand it without any apparent effort or previous exposure to the idea. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive" for non-HCI specialists. Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). ![]() Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces" Communications of the ACM.
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