A number of people commenting on the Zune and iTunes blog post believe Apple's program is intuitive. What exactly do they mean?
We can argue dictionary definitions, but in the context of information technology the word 'intuitive' is mainly used to mean something so obvious you don't even need to think about it. The implication is, you can pick a piece of technology up and use it without being trained or told what to do.
Yeah right.
Does anyone really believe pushing a mouse pointer across a screen and clicking and holding to move files is really intuitive? It's clever. It's pretty. It's technically elegant and it's easy to learn. But it isn't intuitive.
You can say the same about the iPod user interface. It's functional, well designed and easy to master. But the last time I looked rolling a thumb around a dial to select tunes didn't strike me as intuitive.
Sex is intuitive. Eating is intuitive. Finding a warm place to sleep at night is intutitive. Running away from Sabre Tooth TIgers is intuitive. You don't need a user manual to do these things.
very true. the ipod's interface is very easy to learn, but it's not intuitive.
i scratch my head when people complain about microsoft zune's "fake clickwheel." people just assume clickwheels are natural because they are popular with the ipod. they are, as you said, elegant and clever, but not intuitive.
chances are that if you knew nothing about an ipod, you'd click the "back<<" button on the clickwheel to return to the previous level, instead of hitting "menu", because you actualy hit the back button a net browser to go back to the previous screen.
Posted by: monkeyastronaut | October 5, 2006 1:23 PM
Am I in the minority? When I picked up my ipod for the first time I just about deafened myself with it, being an average kiwi bloke I naturally shunned the instruction book, and spun the click wheel.... they are very easy to learn, but thats not intuitive in my book
Posted by: Borg909 | October 5, 2006 4:39 PM