UX London Tweets – Jared Spool

Here is a dump of my live tweets during Jared’s presentation at UX London. I’m writing a more coherent version of this for Johnny Holland – coming soon!

• warming up my twitter fingers in a vain attempt to keep up with @jmspool, who is up next at
• ‘ …and they thought that was just a senseless waste of asterisks’ @jmspool is on form
• designs can’t intuit anything, people intuit things, calling design ‘intuitive’ is a shortcut.
• people become frustrated because they are no longer focussing on what they are doing, they are focussing on the design itself
• novelty isn’t always responsible for unintuitive design, sometimes it is simplicity
• intuitive design is a personal thing – it is based on what you currently know (your previous experiences)
• intuitive design is evolutionary – as the technology matures, our expectation for intuitive design increases.
• Current Knowledge (what the user brings with them to the design) & Target Knowledge (what they need to have to complete their task)
• In between ‘Current’ and ‘Target’ knowledge = ‘The Gap’. Design happens in The Gap.
• is anyone at #uxlondon heading over to tonight’s UX London bookclub? (via @Wandster) > I am! :)
• Lots of excellent (but not so tweetable) comparisons of IM setup pages and their relative ‘intuitiveness’
• wizards reduce Target Knowledge, which is great… as long as they work. If they don’t work, the user is screwed.
• a design is intuitive if target and current knowledge are the same, or the knowledge gap imperceptibly small.
• ethnography/field research: users in the mist @jmspool
• Techniques for creating intuitive designs: Field Studies (Current Knowledge), Usability Studies (Target Knowledge)
• use robust personas to store and communicate what you learn from your user studies
• can’t believe @jmspool hasn’t cracked a ‘mind the gap’ joke yet