Intuitive Design – When Psychology And Culture Work Together

User Experience Design: Complete UX Fundamentals Course

​Will They Love It Or Not?
 
New products and techniques are appearing every day. Not all of them catch on, though, and this is what separates the success from the failures. Often the idea itself is good however the way it is implemented is not. If the process involved with implementing your idea is not intuitive and easy to use or understand then less people will be willing to put in the effort to learn. Intuition is the process of finding the path of least resistance for human behaviour. It is when the body and mind seem to already know what to do. It’s not easy to produce things that intuitively work, especially if we already understand and have designed the process ourselves. Just because we have spent a long time working on a project and have understood every branch of its structure, other people are completely in the dark to this. We need to make sure that a newcomer can walk into our idea and already have a good idea about what to do next.
 
What Makes Us Who We Are?
 
When we are born into the world, it is in its given state. Progress has reached so far on every level of our understanding. The moral and social structure is defined by the laws of the land, the rules given at home, and the ideals presented by our stories. The enemy in our stories serves as an example of what is wrong in behaviour and the hero is an example of what is right. Right action and wrong action are defined in the guise of fictional and religious characters who get the results their behaviour deserves. This is why we prefer it when the hero wins, and the villain is stopped. Human beings are a mixture of hero and villain in varying amounts. We are all capable of evil and of goodness. This is because of our psychology. It’s important to remember that the structure of our brain is much more ancient than the human being design. Our brains are built on the foundations of a wild animal with predators and danger. As animal kind is unaware of the passage of time and the cause and effect of build-up phenomena, it was very important for reactionary emotion to be powerful enough to save lives. Our reactional emotions have a hierarchy of activity, the more basic and primordial the activity, the less thought and the less power we have to intellectually intervene. What makes us human therefore is a compliment of biological and evolutionary design based on the truth about the world plus the input of our human language and conceptual idea building that helps us to understand the time dimension in the way we behave in order to manage social society. If you behave in the way of the villain, you we be treated by the world and other people in the way we have learned through stories. As we learn more about the world and the way the universe actually works, as we learn about the way people behave and think, we adapt and evolve culturally and biologically to ensure the best chance of survival. In one point in time, it is difficult to see this progression of understanding and structure, however a study in biology or the history of power will identify this process with a clear growth in the right direction. 
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​What Is Intuition?
 
When a person is able to intuitively navigate a new product or process, it is because they instinctively know the right course of action. Like knowing a ball will fall when dropped, we automatically put our hands in the right place to catch it. This intuitive approach uses both the laws of the world and the laws of human behaviour to navigate the next step. If catching a ball was not part of our human behaviour, we might not put our hands out. If we did not understand gravity, we might not catch it either. Animals understand gravity, and some social animals understand catching, humans can turn this into a game with clear rules and a score. The way the rules manifest fall into intuition quite easily as they all serve a purpose to keep the game fair. This cultural adaptation is able to become as automatic as the physical function. As method and reality meet in the middle, human beings are able to go ahead and behave appropriately. The two sides of the truth of life are rooted in the natural world, which is unforgiving, often harsh and cruel, and the human world which is striving for balance, safety, longevity, and peace. The two world views are alive in all of us and our intuition is the path that runs through the middle.
 
The Way Things Are
 
We’re all pretty much veterans of the world. The processes and products available to us have particular ways of working. When you cross from one product to another or one service to another, the method of use remains similar. That design of human interactivity is almost the same for all things, provided they have relevance to one another. A television works the same way with buttons and wires no matter what brand it is or what country you are in. We have things in our culture that are ancient such as language itself or religious ceremony and in this case the cultural thread is highly established. These cultural phenomena are much older than us and have been designed and perpetuated by long lines of individuals through time. To decide to change this in any way is therefore controversial because we are just one individual trying to change the work of many. This principle is called the schema. The schema of a thing is the way it is thought about and used in stories to bring about certain results. It relies on the universal properties of the object and of human behaviour to create life-like thoughts and associations that match. Heuristic processing is the action of using what we already know to define and use something we do not know. We rely on the schemas and stories that we remember to find positive function in new things.
 

​Put This To Good Use
 
The idea of designing something for intuitive use therefore rests on our ability to appreciate the way people think and the way the world actually works. If we can mirror this truth about the universe in our product by utilising the natural psychology of human beings that stems from prehistorical times with the modern and make-sense ideas of the era we live in, the end result will seem a natural fit for those who use it. It is not easy to design intuitively, we struggle to guess and estimate without first gaining the appropriate knowledge. We need experience and understanding in the areas we want to affect before we can pose a useful speculation or creation. Often a lot of tests and trials are needed alongside wholesome research into the areas we want to be part of. We need to appreciate the way those who came before us went about the job at hand so we can follow in their steps. The steps walked by our ancestors are the same steps that instructed everyone alive now so we need to provide a path that can be walked. To create something that can be used easily and naturally, the individual user must have a good idea about what they’re doing before they begin.