Intuition and UIs: NO!

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.

 

Phone UIs are almost always not able to be uninstalled.