Rashid Mansoor argues that intuitive design isn't always the best design. Sometimes the fastest or most effective solution feels counterintuitive. The real goal is reducing friction and adoption friction, not chasing intuition for its own sake.
So this is interesting. I have a problem with intuition in the sense that intuitive is not necessarily the best, most effective. I can learn something that maybe is not as intuitive, but then it turns out to be the best methodology and the fastest one to do something.
Yeah.
So I wonder whether intuitive is the thing that we should be optimizing for.
Yeah, so that's a good question. Sometimes the intuitive solution to something is not the best solution. But here what I mean more is, as far as our experiences go, what's more intuitive and what's less intuitive. And the reason I think that's important is because our ability to connect with something or to adopt something rapidly increases if it's easier, if there's less we need to learn to do it, if there are fewer models in our way. Right. But that said, you're right that sometimes the intuitive-sounding solution is not the best. Sometimes the best solution is a counterintuitive one. But here I'm talking more about usage or the user experience.
This is an adoption question almost. We want to make it as simple as possible for— as intuitive, which is different from simple, but as intuitive as possible for someone to get up to speed onto an experience so that there is no friction of interaction. So the interface is almost one-to-one of how you interact with the real life and virtual life.
And it introduces something, another dimension to it, which is, for example, something that we've seen with players and avatars is that you connect to your avatar in an intuitive way that you don't a chat app. Right. So people form relationships in these online worlds that you wouldn't if you were just using WhatsApp, for example.
