+ purple button

+ which says Sign In

+ near the top-right corner of their screen.

You will be amazed how much more effective that makes them at carrying out directions. (If you can only pick one, go for color or similar visual distinctiveness. Your users have long-since stopped reading everything on their computer because "none of it makes sense anyhow.")

In my experience it is worth overruling your designer's desire for visual continuity and having your most important button(s) be uniquely identifiable by color. (Strictly speaking I use purple for two things, but if they try to sign in by signing up for the free trial they'll be signed in like they intended.)

It was painful, but I relish the idea of walking someone through a GUI to do it even less.

I eventually got through it by getting them on IM and giving them text to copy-paste, and sometimes they'd send me screenshots.

Your user's mental model is that they are looking at a black and white screen written in ancient Aramaic. They can't read it, they won't try to read it, and they cannot keep it in their working set while speaking with you or while engaged in other tasks such as, most relevantly, typing. They hope the demon on the phone will tell them the right magic spell, because this is so frustrating.

But irrespective of their inability to read ancient Aramaic, they can still identify color, location, and motion. So the clever demon will always phrase his requests to read ancient Aramaic in terms of color, location, and motion.

This was the same class where I tried to use the theory of evolution as an example, and about half the class laughed, because to them the theory was just a ridiculous idea. Gotta love the Bible belt!

EDIT: I think there's two keys to the true intuitiveness of an interface that many people overlook. It's easier to make an intuitive interface if you narrow the domain of an interface. It's also easier if you narrow the effective bandwidth of the interface -- show the user more data and they tend to be more confused, show the user less data and they tend to be less confused. Apple seems to apply this in Front Row and in iOS.

This isn't at all uncommon actually, especially among adults age 50+. Double-clicking a mouse requires a certain amount of manual dexterity, but we've all forgotten that because we developed it a long time ago and to such an extent that it's become effortless.

http://cil614.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/kensington_trackba...

Perhaps she was dyspraxic? Presumably you (or the person responsible) set the middle button to double click or used some other mouse accessibility fix?

1) Would always miss when he clicked (single click). He'd line it up, eyebrows screwed up in concentration, raise his index finger up high, bit his tongue with intensity, and mash that finger downward. Unfortunately, all the full-body effort of mashing that finger down meant that he skewed the mouse a good few centimeters in a random direction, meaning the entire task started over again.

2) Absolutely did not understand that Wordstar (yeah, you read right) isn't a typewriter. He would laboriously space-space-space-space... manually center text. Hit enter at the end of every line. He would type sentences in -- while staring at the keyboard and using his index fingers -- only to finally glance up and notice an error three lines prior. He would then backspace-backspace-backspace... deleting all the characters until he reached the offending error.

Watching over his shoulder provided perhaps the most fascinating and educational experience I've ever had in user interfaces.

- Running multiple applications at the same time is too confusing. She doesn't understand/notice the taskbar. She always tries to close one thing before starting another. Also, she doesn't notice that she has four copies of gmail open in the same browser -- since she doesn't understand what tabs are either.

- Window geometry is never manipulated. She has never maximized, minimized, or resized a window.

- As a result of the first two problems, inter-window operations such as drag and drop, cut and paste are often impossible.

- She doesn't know when it's correct to left click, right click, or double left click to do what she wants. So she opts for double-clicking on everything: links, buttons, menus, credit card purchases...

- She used to have 10 different "toolbars" activated in word 2003 because she couldn't find the button she needed, and they are randomly positioned everywhere because of accidental dragging (probably from overzealous double-clicking). Then one day she accidentally dragged the main toolbar offscreen, and was no longer able to open, save, or print...

- Corollary to above -- she avoids menus, since they appear to her as a hierarchical wall of text full of jargon. Also, they are difficult to use when you tend to over-double-click, since they close themselves...

- Activating Chinese UI in i18n-enabled programs it is often detrimental, as she doesn't have the tech vocabulary in Chinese either, and it just makes it harder for me to help her remotely.

- She clicks on a word doc attachment in gmail, spends hours editing it, and can never find the file again, because it's really called "C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Temp\awq2a393.doc"

- She will click OK on any dialog box to make it go away, because she is trained to close dialog boxes that way. Even if the dialog box is a security popup warning for a sketchy activeX control.

- She calls firefox "the google" because it was installed by google pack, and opens to the google homepage. She doesn't know the difference between the browser and the internet.

- She doesn't understand why she can't print a web page and have it look nice, without all the extra columns of ad junk.

+ Okay, one thing that does work well for her -- hitting control key twice accesses google desktop search popup to find anything -- even those annoying files in TEMP. She can remember that shortcut.

Once ipad gets traditional chinese support -- I'm going to get her one, and cut my tech support calls by 90%...

My mother has been using Outlook at her office for over 5 years. When I send an email to both her and my father, she replies only to me and frequently ends with "tell your father..."

-Copy and paste

Somehow, she understands CUT and paste, but can't make the mental leap to COPY. She typically cuts, pastes it right back to where she came from, and then goes to paste it again elsewhere.

--

Despite all this, she used to work with a 100% text mode CLI app for requisitioning with airline tickets as a travel agent. She was an expert at esoteric commands and had a little notebook that co-workers had photocopied and bound as a reference manual. She didn't understand a thing that she was typing, but she knew which magic incantations worked and which didn't. I noticed that she was doing the equivalent of calling functions, piping data, storing variables, etc., but to her it was "I type this in, and instead of 'CITY' I write the actual city name. Oh, but if the city name has a space in it, I need to type \ before the space. But if I type a \ anywhere else, it can crash the whole computer."

That's a pro trick, I think. I consider myself a power user and I switched from copy+paste to cut+paste+paste a while ago. It gives me an extra kick of making sure the copy worked as intended.

Machines with multiple functions/modes/uses are a generational thing. Up until the late 70's hardly anyone ever encountered a profoundly multi-function device before. Multitasking devices didn't come into mainstream use until later. Think about it, isn't it weird to have something that can be one kind of appliance, then after activating one control, have it change into a different kind of thing altogether? That would be like a fruit that resembles a pear when you peel it one way but an orange when you peel it another.

One can buy an actual crowbar/plier/wirecutter/hammer/wrench/screwdriver. A lot of people probably find it easier to have 1 tool for each purpose and grab the right one.

Does anyone remember the 1970's? Just how well would a TV/typewriter/stereo/VCR/telephone/phonograph/answering machine have sold? I think most people's eyes would've glazed over. Well, the personal computer has functions that subsume all of those devices, and the eyes of a lot of adults who were alive back then do glaze over when they encounter one.

That just blew my mind. I've never thought of a computer as _being_ all of those devices. I've always held the mental model of a computer being a really dumb robot of sorts that would perform separate actions.

Like a computer could _do_ all of those things, much in the same way I can drive, cook, balance a checkbook, etc.

Knowing that a particular interface is almost completely accidental is often the key missing piece in going from being utterly helpless to solve a problem to being able to puzzle it out.

Yes! A lot of interfaces are largely arbitrary fictions! If more people understood this, there would also be fewer fan boyish arguments.

Also suggests a metric/strategy: minimize the amount of fiction in your UI and maximize the fundamental principles. (Example, sliders are well understood, because most people understand basic geometry.)

Only a matter of time before some biotech genius invents a fruit that has different tastes depending on how you peel it, then it's my turn for a brain meltdown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece

- Double click (they double click or triple click everything, i.e click till it does something) a certain icon to video chat with us.

- Another icon to send email (a bookmark to gmail)

Even in something like Skype, finding the Chat window (the one you type into) while video chatting is a struggle every time. That skype has a proliferation of tabs and buttons doesn't help, but the idea is that the _vocabulary_ to deal with this sort of thing isn't known to them. I often end up getting frustrated trying to help them do something, and that's when they are already on a video chat with me.

Personally, this sort of thing is very saddening. That I cannot talk to them about the internet (outside of mail and video chat), that they may not fully realize the extent of human accomplishment in the age the live in, is heartbreaking to me. Bad software interfaces are excluding entire generations of human beings from learning about and using technology effectively.

Because I had double-click-home set to the camera, this meant that every other time I started my iPhone, it was in the camera app, which was really confusing a lot of the time. Once I started installing the iOS4 betas, though, and double-click-home became 'reveal task switcher', her double-triple-quintuple clicking the home button did nothing but show and hide a row of icons.

After the first time she did that and I made fun of her, she learned pretty quick. Still, this sort of thing happens to the smartest/most capable/most educated people. It's not just mom and dad.

`hahahaha, buuuuuurn`

That said, we're the kids of the world by most standards (median age).

You think Thompson or Pike chill on here?

I don't know if it is true, but it does seem to have some air of truth around it.

I mean, why would it be "intuitive" to drag the floppy disk into the trash-can to eject it?

As the article points out, we're trying to rely on metaphors to ease the learning curve for users, but metaphors, like all abstractions, are leaky.

When we call a UI "intuitive", what we are really saying is that the metaphors chosen enable those who understand the metaphor to leverage this understanding to intuit how to operate the UI.

EDIT: added final para.

http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

Heck, flying a plane is definitely intuitive, but it takes a large number of hours to be considered good enough to do it on your own.

EDIT: The ultimate example is flying a helicopter. All of the parts of a helicopter are so dynamically linked, a simply described operation like "move to the right" is going to take a bunch of simultaneous adjustments on several controls at once. There is actually no way to fly a helicopter, except intuitively, and it's definitely not easy at first.

In your helicopter example, the interface is (your) intuitive because it can't be done by thinking, you have to just "intuit" what to do.

However, people would say the helicopter is highly counter-intuitive, since there are four main controls and four degrees of freedom, with obvious linkages between them to anyone who has a passing knowledge of 'copters or 'planes. Despite this, every control affects two or more degrees of freedom, which is highly counter-intuitive, since everyone is used to vehicles where the controls affect only one degree of freedom.

TL;DR: You are using intuition to mean "unconscious competence", but generally, intuitive is used as a synonym of "obvious."

Awareness of all of these different sorts of "intuitiveness" probably distinguishes the excellent UI designers from the average ones.

EDIT: Not only are the unconscious competencies very powerful, they also tend to be highly optimized.

My point is: this problematic does not only apply to UI design. In general, whenever we use abstraction (which we do all the time, often in the name of brevity) we are taking a risk-- and one of those risks, to extend Raskin's metaphor, is uncanniness.

And lo! did teh n00bs poke and jabbeth at the iThing, achieving much of what was desired.

I'm one of those people that can pick up just about any gadget and work out how it works (much as I expect you are dear reader). I'm the go-to for computer repairs and questions for family and friends, I help people work their mobile phones, set-up their AV equipment, etc., I've done stage lighting, sound engineering, a very little electronics .. you get the picture. I can even work a Mac!

My play on this whole question is that an interface is intuitive if I can work it out without the instruction booklet in a short time. Pretty handy-wavy for sure.

I'd generally argue that the reason you have troubles with the iPod is because you've learned to think like an engineer... ie, unlearning how to think like an uninformed user in the process. You're not exactly their target audience (nor am I).

Out of pure curiosity, which iPod style is this referring to? Scrollable-wheel, click-wheel, touch, shuffle? I personally find the click-wheel versions to be a bit annoying because they don't register scrolling accurately enough.

My response was that reaching out and touching something that you're interested in is about as intuitive as you can get. Even my kitten 'understands' that if she wants to interact with the sun falling from the sky in Plants vs. Zombies, she just paws at it. She does have a tendency to attack randomly and plant things everywhere, but she's got the basic idea.

A lot of other tech-minded people, however, seem intent on trying to shoehorn the touch interface into their concept of a WIMP UI, then complain when it doesn't work. One coworker, on the day the iPad was announced, even exclaimed 'But it doesn't even have a stylus!', to which seven other people in the department replied 'Good'.

I don't use the term "intuition" in the exact way I use the term "intuitive" wrt a UI. I warrant that you're correct that my thought processes could align to some extent with those of the creators of any interface that I'm attempting to grok and that this appears as if the interface is intuitive.

Intuitiveness (rather than "intuition" to make the distinction I hinted about above) in an interface that relies on metaphor (affordance of buttons enhanced by shadow, etc.) is simply about familiarity.

A previous comment mentioned a simple light-switch as being possibly lacking in affordance for a jungle-dweller who lacks knowledge of our technology. I'd agree that they're unlikely to intuit what to do, but the interface to my mind is intuitive in that once one tries it then the feedback leads to a ready analysis of the effect and enables rapid understanding of the superficial workings.

What's intuitive? It's all learned from something. We can't even pick our nose when we're first born, we have to figure out how to move our arm.

There indeed is a real intuitive.

If you don't know what a pulldown do then it doesn't help that the design is consistently using pulldowns.

Right-click actions are, by their nature, hidden, and there's often no indication that you can right-click to get more actions. Case in point, the windows taskbar's system tray. Lots of icons, most do something when you click on them, but often they do different things depending on how you click. Since clicking does something, it's not always obvious that what you want might only be available by right clicking.

Also, depending on which mouse button you use, 'safely remove devices' will either give you a menu of devices to safely remove, or give you a menu with one option, which opens a window with a list of devices to safely remove.

Critics have derided the Mac's no-right-click mouse for ages, but for the non-technical user, not well-versed in the behaviour of a computer, it makes much more sense.

He knew how to suck and he knew how to swallow, but couldn't put them together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm_FzLya8y4

What do you want to do?

I want to record sound

OK, the computer is organised in terms of files and directories where a file is a chunk of information with a nametag like in an office filing cabinet, and the microphone is presented as an imaginary never ending file where the chunk of information changes every time you look at it, and you'll need to run a program to repeatedly look at the file and copy the contents to a new file in a directory of your choice... no, you can't put it "anywhere" and then search for it later, you are forced to choose a directory for it.

Your files have all the lines messed up? That's because it's built as if it's a typewriter with a forced "I'm at the end of a line" instruction which you never need to care about until you get a page from another typewriter where the operator had to push a different button at the end of a line and when he looks at the page it looks fine but when you look at the page you see it as if you had typed it on your typewriter pressing his end-of-line button which you don't have on your typewriter so it doesn't do anything, so you see one long line, ha ha!

Just as it isn't a full and knock-down criticism of GUI's to point out that people have done them badly, this attack doesn't go to the core idea of command lines, "type what you want to have happen." The available metaphors can and should be made more in line with how people think of what computers can do.

it's like math.

YMMV. Most of the HN population can deal with math. Some people's pupils constrict and their brains shut down.

Someone in another thread mentioned that their parents have trouble with even the abstraction of programs for tasks. The parents know what they want to have happen "send an email to their son", but connecting that to a program that needs to be started and used and then possibly closed again is something they seem to forget. Well, in that case, a simple command line environment for getting them to the right task-based interface would be as good as anything else, so long as it had a natural and discoverable vocabulary. It is perfectly natural for me to put some words in a row to communicate to you what they wanted, and at some point they probably put some words in a row to tell him what they were getting frustrated with the computer about. So why is it that one would think that having them put the same words in a row for the computer is somehow, despite being quite intuitive in all these other contexts, suddenly for the computer it is not intuitive?

No, back in the day computers simply weren't up to the task of interpreting all the myriad ways that someone might have said "email my son". And command line environments were not made with discoverablity, friendliness, and forgiveness in mind. The people using them were willing to bend their own minds to the limitations and peculiarities of the command lines. And instead of making them better and better for other users, the programmers and designers thought they could get more bang for the buck with pictures instead. Thus things have gone quite far down that path until we are arguing over what visual cues for controlling stacks of windows of disparate interface paradigms are more intuitive, what icon best reminds people of "email", and how to get them to notice/remember which text box they should put their son's name in. Meanwhile computers are quite powerful enough for someone to take an fresh, intelligent stab at merging a command line back onto the screen so that computers can finally catch up to taking commands the way a normal three year old finds perfectly intuitive.

The only real problems they've called with recently though are 'suddenly I can't get on the internet' problems, which is usually solved by saying "look in the Add/Remove Programs control panel for anything that says 'Norton' or 'Symantec', then uninstall it and reboot"

TL;DR: After a few weeks/months/years of Mac use, you can disclaim all knowledge of Windows to family members. Symantec sucks.

A touch screen on the other hand that don't register where you click but just randomly chose coordinates now that would be noticed.

When I went to her house I got on her computer and said, "where's the mouse?" She didn't know what I was talking about, of course. She sewed a lot, so when I discovered that she thought it was some kind of foot pedal, I guess that makes sense.

These things are always illuminating. "Scroll up" gets a confused expression. She initially just tried moving the mouse. Click the scrollbar. What's that? How do you click? The button on the mouse? Which one? Do I click and release or hold the click? etc...

It's amazing how many minor details we can't help but take for granted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism