Knowledge Gap in UX Design
The Oxford English Dictionary defines intuition as follows:
in·tu·i·tion/ˌint(y)o͞oˈiSHən/
Noun:
The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
I’ve seen some great presentations by Jared Spool on what constitutes intuitive web design. He often refers to a hypothesis called “The Knowledge Gap”. Simply stated, in UX this is the gap between what the user already knows about using websites and what their target knowledge level should be to find a site or task completely intuitive.
This is interesting to me, because the implication here is that people learn what is intuitive. I always thought of intuition as something that came naturally, not something that was taught or learned. But to elicit this specific type of instinctive behavior, it seems to require learning. For artificial interfaces to become intuitive, the design has to teach the user what intuition means in that context.
Just think of the paradigms that Microsoft has taught us over the years that suddenly makes Word and its functionality seem intuitive. That is, until they rearrange everything, change the interactions and wonder why people don’t like it anymore.
I recently made the switch from a pretty sweet little Windows 7 HP Pavilion P6000 that cost me a little over $300 on woot.com, to a 27-inch Apple iMac…that cost significantly more. And let me tell you, a good deal of that interface was not intuitive to me. It is now, but that’s because my Knowledge Gap has been trained up. It’s been three months since I added the iMac to my pile o’ tech, and I’m quite enjoying it.
Why was I a PC hold out so long, especially in my profession? Because my brother is a braniac computer wiz (and full-time Computer Science university professor) who always Frankensteined my PCs together. For a long time he poo-pooed Macs, so I got really good, custom-built PCs. Why go anywhere else?
Now that I have an iMac, both at home and at work, I really enjoy it. But I still find myself scooting all of my applications to the upper left corner of the screen because that’s where the menu is for the program I’m currently using. Why is this natural for me? Microsoft taught me that the upper left is where your menu starts on a desktop, but it’s attached to the program’s window.
Of course, when I go back and work on my PC I find myself trying to scroll in reverse. I have a love/hate relationship with the Apple multi-gesture mouse at this point.
This need for learning “intuitive design” is why Spool mentioned in a relatively old post of his on UIE that a design cannot be inherently intuitive. People intuit, interfaces do not. Spool says:
“To those who police the English language, interfaces can’t be intuitive, since they are the behavior side of programs and programs can’t intuit anything. When someone is asking for an intuitive interface, what they are really asking for is an interface that they, themselves, can intuit easily. They are really saying, “I want something I find intuitive.”
But, I believe that English is an adaptable medium, so it’s ok with me if we call a design intuitive.”
So where does “intuitive design” go wrong? Let me show you. This fine little example from WebMD’s mobile site jumps out as bad design mojo.
What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s see. There’s a menu icon represented by three stacked lines in the upper left. Why do I know that’s a menu icon? Because Facebook’s mobile app taught me that.
Now a little further down the screen on the right side, you see another icon. It has three stacked lines just like the menu icon, but it also has bullet points in front of each lines. Well someone clearly thought that might be confusing, so they decided to teach the users what that second, different icon meant.
Here’s what you get when you tap the top menu icon:
And here is the result of tapping the bulleted-list menu icon:
Would it have been too difficult to come up with a “related content” link or icon? That would eliminate the confusion between having two icons that both represent menus…but different types of menus.
Of course, now that they’ve conveniently taught me what those icons mean, I’ll remember it for that particular mobile site. The problem is, it’s not portable knowledge. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a lot of mobile sites adopting the bulleted menu icon to specifically mean “related content.”
Seeing that example on WebMD’s mobile website has taught me something as a designer, though. It’s a good reminder of the need to keep consistency of experience, iconography, emerging trends and clarity in mind when designing.
Knowledge Gap image from UNU-ViE_SCIENTIA on Flickr
