John said:
That's interesting! Intuition is *learned*? (Daiya is one who would know:
I'm asking...)
well, I'm not any sort of expert on it--but yes, I think so--or maybe
acquired is a better word than learned, since no one teaches intuition.
The web turns up definitions that equate to "the direct perception of
meaning or truth, without conscious reasoning"--but just because that
reasoning isn't conscious doesn't mean it isn't there, happening at a
subconscious level. So our subconscious gets trained in certain
ways--one set of training and we find Adobe intuitive, another sort of
training we find Pages intuitive. Pages may take less training than
Adobe which may take less training than Word, sure, but that doesn't
mean you don't have to know things.
For instance, for *any* software program to be intuitive, you have to
understand how to move a mouse, and that things happen when buttons are
double-clicked. That's certainly learned behavior--without that
*nothing* is intuitive. I think the stuff that follows is equally as
acquired. Same thing as these paradigms you mentioned--at a
subconscious level the brain predicts "based on the other things that I
know, if I click here, it might do what I want." If the brain guessed
right, then we call the program intuitive. Sure, it's intuitive to
*your* brain, because you are familiar with the paradigm of a filing
cabinet or an artist's palette. I guess right in Word quite a bit.
I think "discoverability", though an ugly word, is more accurate than
"intuitive" for software--the Office 2008 design is about making it
easier for the person to guess right, and to need less previous
information to base that guess on. I think Pages gets called intuitive
for that very reason--they did a good job of putting the most common
guesses right up in front, big and obvious. But occasionally I read the
Pages forums, and some of the answers are incredibly unintuitive, as bad
as Word for circuitous settings.
I think (haven't gotten around to reading it yet), that the book Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell deals with this--I don't think he calls it
intuition, but I think he tries to quantify such subconscious reasoning.
Daiya
