Intuition and UIs: NO!

[Rix]

Many phone reviewers massively overestimate the importance of intuition in an UI. This is because they only have the phone for a few hours before reviewing it - they have no time to learn how to use the less intuitive UIs. This means they'll rate the intuitive UIs disproportionately high and the unintuitive ones low. This isn't the right way to review phones. People usually have a phone for over a year. Even the stupidest person will have fully learned how to use the most complicated UI properly after a week of using it. That's an insignificant fraction of the total time they own the phone. Therefore the amount of time saved by an intuitive UI (as a result of having to spend little or no time learning how to use it) is insignificant.

The most important factor of a UI is the average amount of time it takes to accomplish a task. Nokia had the right idea. When they redesigned their UI they tried to minimize the number of selections a user had to make to reach a destination. Nexus One's UI should be rated highly due to the speech recognition's deep integration, making it quick and easy to get from anywhere to anywhere. Don't get mixed up and think that a intuitive UI is necessarily quick to use - that would be a misunderstanding of the word and would cause you to struggle to understand this whole post.

The second most important factor of a UI is how easy it is to accomplish a task. For me, it's quick to bench press 200kgs, but it's not easy. A UI should be designed so that it's fairly easy to use.

Where does the beauty come in? Everyone loves a pretty UI, right? Well, that should be put on last after all the functionality has been ironed out. It is incorrect to allow the appearance of a UI (by this I mean colours used, animations, sounds etc) affect the functionality of a UI.

We MUST STOP phone reviewers rating a phones UI according to its intuitiveness. I call for a boycott of all phone reviewers who use the word intuitive in their reviews. OK, maybe that might be a little extreme. But if you do see a phone reviewer use the word intuitive, just be aware that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

[lekky]

If its not intuitive then a typical user will try it for 2 mins then uninstall it...

 

[Rix]

If its not intuitive then a typical user will try it for 2 mins then uninstall it...

Phone UIs are almost always not able to be uninstalled.

 

[lekky]

Phone UIs are almost always not able to be uninstalled.

Ah sorry, could have sworn you were talking about apps

 

[vincentp]

I agree with the OP. I also think that people overestime the necessity of "intuitiveness" in a phone UI. Everybody keeps telling me the iPhone is "more intuitive", "more intuitive". Well, what the hell does that mean? It means, honestly, it's ridiculously simple. An idiot could figure it out. Given, an idiot could figure out Android, too, it would just take him a little bit longer.

In the end, though, what this really means to me is that the UI is limited. If you can figure out everything that it can do in a nominal amount of time, then sorry, but it can't do all that much. It also means it's ugly. Half of the reason the iPhone is so "easy-to-use" is because it crams everything on the screen, and you don't really have a choice in the matter. If someone wants to find an app, well, it's probably sitting on the home screen with everything else.

After using my phone for a little over a month, and having used iPhones in the past, I can safely say that I can't perform anything more quickly on the iPhone than I can on the Droid. Intuitiveness, as the word is typically used, is pointless except to soften the learning curve when someone initially gets a phone.

As the OP said, once you have a phone for a little while, this goes out the window. Show me someone who has had an iPhone for a year or two. I guarantee I can accomplish any task on my Android phone just as quickly if not more quickly. So where's the intuitiveness? It was gone after a few weeks.