Comment by al_borland
4 months ago
I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive. But there could be multiple assumptions on how it should work on first use. Covering all of those possibilities, and integrating them into a cohesive experience that works the first time, and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact, shows a strong attention to detail and design.
This is opposed to something that may be very intuitive for 30% of people, but the other 70% are lost, and the implementation doesn't scale.
I think in UX there is general lack of desire to properly explain how stuff works instead of relying on just "guessing user expectations right"
like if said knob just displayed a vertical bar with marks signalling up and down also works it would be very clear to person that tried to just spin it
Hmm, may be you're right about UX designers not wanting to explain. For instance, I certainly won't want that vertical bar for aesthetic reasons. It's just hard to defend objectively.
> and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact
That's the part that's questionable. Sometimes you just need to pick a way and the other 70% will get used to it. If you make something that tries to fit every intuition, the users can can get stuck with persistent random failures indefinitely, as people that understand one mode accidentally trigger a different mode and almost nobody has a full mental model of how it works.
> I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive.
That's what unintuitive means.