Learned intuitiveness, sounds like an oxymoron right? Learned intuitiveness is when you need to learn the general principles of how an interface works before it is intuitive (obvious) how to make it do what you want. In other words it is NOT automatically understood. Let's take a look at what Merriam Webster says about intuitiveness. There are two definitions that we should look at, the others are defined (in terms of intuitive)
- directly apprehended
- readily learned or understood
It is the later one that defines learned intuitiveness, it is easily understood, but perhaps not instantaneously. As an example of this, take an iPhone user and hand them and Android phone, or visa versa, and ask them to make a phone call. In my experience, unless one if familiar with both platforms, the user will fumble around trying to do what is natural for them on the platform they are used to because they learned that intuitiveness.
While this is wonderful for vendors because when users need to upgrade they will quite often stay with the platform they are familiar with due to their familiarity with it, they have learned the intuitiveness of that vendor's interface. In UX terms, upgrading to a new version of a platform should not break the users mental model.
The question that I feel needs to be posed is do we need to rely on learned intuitiveness or can we build an interface that is automatically understood? I am not certain what the answer is and would love to hear your thoughts.
