Intuitive interfaces are bad for you

OK, perhaps not short term, but long term they could be bad, very bad.

I'm the first one to be annoyed if I cannot find the navigation or the interesting links within milliseconds. Being confused by what to do next is not my favourite either.

Interesting though, the way I use 'intuitive' is equal to 'seen it before' or 'the way I'm used to'. Fair enough, makes life easier etc etc.

But...

If we keep on doing what we did yesterday, in the same manner, then we will never move forward and the world will slowly grind to a halt.

In truth, 'evolution' requires the 'counter-intuitive'.

I'm currently hitting this issue with Thingamy, and it's not about colour schemes or navigation-bar-placement:

We are used to be the work-flow structure ourselves; we have to remember what to do, spend time on finding task-relevant information and fire up many different applications or websites. That ruins any notion of flow, limits our creativity and is bad for business. Nevertheless that is what we're used to and have accepted as a given - thus any application or system that work in this workshop'ish mode is deemed intuitive.

Thingamy is the work-flow structure by itself - you (or somebody else) starts a 'flow' when the customer calls, a patient arrives or whatever that initiates your value-adding activities. After that everything is automatic, tasks are delivered immediately when the previous task is done, it's delivered to the right person and all information and tools are delivered in the same instance still allowing for participant-induced changes to the flow-path. 

This is confusing for most (which surprises me no end), and rightly criticised as counter-intuitive. "Where is the button I can click to start my next task, where is the dashboard where I can find all my applications?" - is what I hear. That the task-link is ready to go and waiting patiently smack in the middle of the 'Home' webpage seems to be overshadowed by old habits. 

But I'm sure that a user who's used to a private secretary and a butler would have no problem, getting everything delivered at the right moment would be quite intuitive!

I'm no easy push-over so I'm trying all tricks and careful coaching, no old habits shall block natural progression is my credo. 

Hard work this, and if you have a suggestion as how to make the transition easier, please tell me!

Comments

[phil jones]

Interesting.

This is exactly what I saw at my last employer. We built a system that streamlined the workflow, only showed what was relevant to the users when they needed it rather than make them browse or search for the relevant items.

And, yes, they threw it out and forced us to write an emulation of their existing paper-document based system instead.

[sig]

There you go, and sadly it'll not be the last time that reaction comes up either!

It's pretty crazy though, we all like "getting into the flow" when that happens (guess that's why we have hobbies!), we like it when somebody takes charge and conducts the ongoing so we do not have to bother about remembering all and do I hear complaints about overfilled email inboxes and hard-to-navigate information repositories?

There is a silver lining in this (there always is) - I'm a believer that the first ones who move to a natural workflow will find a huge jump in profitability, employee satisfaction and all other good things - in essence win over their competition. Thus the reward will be huge even if it takes a bit of getting used to... although I think the getting used to will be much easier than they think.

I'm learning every day!