What Makes for an ‘Intuitive’ User Experience?
Everybody wants to build a site that users find easy to use, so what does creating an intuitive user experience really mean?
Every UX designer aspires to create a user experience that looks good and feels ‘intuitive’. So, what do we mean when we say a design feels ‘intuitive’ to the touch?
When designing any great graphical user interface, a UX designer is faced with a few challenges—building a product or experience that solves a problem, and delivering an experience that comes to the user intuitively.
According to renowned UX designer and author Everett McKay, an intuitive design can be achieved by fulfilling a few objective criterion.
“A UI is intuitive when it has an appropriate combination of discoverability, understandability, affordance, predictability, efficiency, responsiveness, forgiveness, and explorability,” writes McKay in his book ‘UI is Communication’.
McKay argues that what feels intuitive to the user is simply intelligent design in action. When design principles are adequately applied and properly executed, the design can feel intuitive to users. Simple gestures on your iPhone such as swiping right on a webpage to go back, scrolling up to proceed down along a text are examples of good design that have become so popular that they’re now ubiquitous. This holds true not only for graphical user interfaces, but also for the UI of commercial electronic devices, such as a qwerty keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, and even a USB pen drive.
The interface that a good UX designer crafts comes with instructions, but the interface that a great UX designer crafts is able to solve the customer’s problem by intuition and exploration alone.
In the midst of the digital revolution, the value of great user experience cannot be understated. The internet presence of the brand has enormous bearing on its success in the market—and in a thriving digital economy, a user experience that customers will love keeps them loyal to the product and the brand.
Amid the tremendous competition in the app development industry, you’d want your user experience to be so seamless that your users would want to come back to it. According to a survey by AppVerticals, 25% of mobile applications are abandoned after the first use—owing to hostile UX.
With so many competing products in the market and a myriad alternative to choose from, it’s unlikely your users will go out of their way to commit to your app when it’s not convenient for them to do so. This may also leave a bad after-taste for the consumers for your company, which is a nightmare for your brand image. Luckily, all of it can be avoided by investing in a robust UX.
The number of interactive devices in the consumer electronics market is skyrocketing. With new mediums to interact with devices through, the way humans and computers interact is in constant flux—always needing user experience designers to intelligently humanize the interaction.
