> The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking).
Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend.
There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experience in many important ways, and trying to pretend it is only burdens the user with inconsistent mental models that don't allow them to navigate and grow their intuition.
The way I see it, it is the failure of UX design that it tries to hide the nature of computers - instead of making it apparent, so that the users can learn and internalize the important axioms of this different world. Intuition needs to be calibrated to the underlying reality for it to be useful.
> Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.
There's few things in the world that have no learning curve. Almost everything is learned. Almost everything that's important in life is learned either through direct training, or picked up over time from exposure. This is where every UX designer inventing their own "simplifying" abstractions is hurting users: nobody is training them, but software is so inconsistent nowadays that they don't get to learn from exposure either.
You're thinking like a HN reader, rather than the intended audience for the chrome omnibar (i.e., non-specialists)
They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings...
Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically beckons to be pulled)...
Whether it's a good thing or not is besides the point. It's how people work, if you want to reach them at scale.
> They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings...
> Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction (...)
Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because computing is new, and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists. Part of the job of UI is to enable the users to build correct mental models in the first place - and to the extent they introduce bad abstractions, they fail at this job, leaving users with bad mental models that don't correspond to reality, and don't let them make sensible predictions.
Note: I don't disagree with Norman. I disagree with how his work is used to justify current UX design trends.
> Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world.
There was a subtle joke about this in Star Trek: The Next Generation: Wesley Crusher, on a visit to a starbase to take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam, stood in front of a door confused until Picard used the handle to open it for him. Wesley had grown up on starships where the doors opened automatically as you approach, and had never seen a door handle before.
According to Wesley's actor, this wasn't in the script and they came up with it right before doing the scene (and it made it into the episode).
> and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists
Strong disagree. Looking at the URL bar in Firefox vs Chrome is a great example of how Chrome nailed an "obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists".
We can look at things like the design of door handles, and clearly see how the shape of the human hand influences the design. If we had tentacles, door handles probably would look more different.
The same thing applies to human minds (as opposed to hypothetical alien minds, or AIs). Humans all have a hippocampus, a prefrontal cortex, and other universal biological factors in cognition which influences HOW thoughts are formed.
You didn't really make an argument for why "brains seem to have parts" leads to "Chrome's omnibar makes sense". The reason Chrome's design is "good"--which I put in quotes, as I absolutely agree that it is "destructive"--is because people are lazy: it is the same reason why co-mingled recycling is "good" and why a world in which trash and recycling were the same bin would be even better, and why a world in which trash, recycling, your toilet, and YOUR OUTGOING MAILBOX were magically all a single slot would somehow be the best thing ever and UX designers would shit themselves with glee over how clever they are for training users that there is a single hole that everything should go into and it is the job of an army of people on the other side of the hole to make that work most of the time... except for the occasional letter that gets recycled and the occasional empty box of cereal that gets mailed back to the cereal company :/.
Well, if that wasn't the worst slippery slope argument I've seen in a while.
That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say "WELL JELLYFISH IS AN ANIMAL WITH DNA TOO SO OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE CAN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JELLYFISH AND DOGS/CATS". Uhhh, no, that's a massive jump to an extreme conclusion. There's a BIG difference between someone typing "facebook" into a URL bar, and them putting their trash in their mailbox.
I'm not saying you should put literally everything including "change settings" or "access your bookmarks" in the omnibar, merely that combining the URL bar and the Search bar was clearly a common sense UI idea, and even Firefox bowed in after a while.
Your job as a developer isn't to force the user to learn more things. Your job as a developer is not to be arrogant and insist that the user must understand some technical model they don't care about. If they want to go to BankOfAmerica.com, and they typed in "BOA", your job is to make it easier for them to do their banking, even if they're massive idiots when it comes to tech. Human brains have a universal structure, which merely means you need to target the lowest common denominator when it comes to design.
As an aside, this is why Apple products historically are known for being very easy to use by the elderly. I certainly am grateful for the fact that my grandparents were able to learn to use Facetime and looked forward to using that software before they passed away. I'm not sure if Apple's ease-of-use is still true, for what it's worth- they've added a lot of complexity in recent years.
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Addendum:
This is HN, full of very smart tech people who also happen to be terrible at empathy, so I'll give the usual spiel on empathy (which is usually disregarded by people with overly large egos): The person who typed "BOA" into the URL bar might be a tech idiot, but that tech idiot may just be a really good neurosurgeon, and that person may just prefer to spend their brain cells dealing with their own specialty. Humans are good at specialization, and I'd rather my brain surgeon not know or care or spend too much of their energy in understanding DNS, or the difference in how Chrome distinguishes URLs from search queries. For that matter, I'd rather not have to teach my grandparents the difference between a URL and a search query, either.
If you (the reader) is anything like the average tech guy, there's a good chance you're physically unhealthy in multiple ways, and in an alternate universe there's an internet forum of doctors lacking empathy who are shaking their heads and saying "why can't our patients simply spent a bit of their brain cells and time on eating correct amounts of the precise macronutrients, identifying each of the 13 major muscle groups and stretch and exercise them every day, actually doing the correct amount of cardio where they track if they hit 160bpm and sustain that amount (under age 45), sleep at the precise time each day for optional functioning of the central nervous system, etc". There's probably a mechanic forum that's complaining about tech guys who own cars and saying "why can't they just do a blackstone oil test to know what's the optimal amount of mileage for their car to do an oil change, why don't they routinely fill up their tires to the labeled air pressure to maximise fuel economy, etc". None of what these doctors or mechanics are suggesting something /unreasonable/ per se... but most of that stuff just aren't priorities for an average person to learn and deal with. In conclusion, you can be extremely smart in the tech industry (or any other field) and still be an absolute idiot in so many ways, and that's okay- but you need to keep in mind that the same thing applies to your users for their fields of non-specialty.
This isn't a slippery slope: this is an analogy. Your example of settings makes no sense as you have failed to draw a similar analogy and your example of bookmarks betrayal your own understanding of the system you like as bookmarks are in fact accessible via the omnibar :/. All of the things in my example were of a similar form, and frankly it would be convenient if anything you wanted to get rid of all went down the same hole: if you actually could solve that problem well, it arguably would be good UX.
The only reason the recycling examples seem absurd is because 1) it simply isn't that difficult to remember "trash goes in a black in and recycling goes in a blue bin and mail goes in... a different blue bin ;P" and 2) it is obvious how hard it is to separate the two results in the general case and the ramifications seem silly to tolerate given the low effort that the user has to take on to prevent it.
The exact same thing is true of the omnibar: there are a bunch of heuristics that often work well enough and people who are particularly lazy and don't want to learn the difference between the various bins don't have to because we figure it out for them... most of the time. I personally think that people shouldn't be so lazy, but it seems like the entire goal of "UX design" is to empower lazy people to "not have to think" (which is very different from "intuitive": after all, "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned").
The reason then I think it is "destructive" goes further, though, than "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy": it is because, as someone else pointed out, there is a cost to leaking a user's intent to the search engine when they wanted to type in an address (in the same way that mailing someone's trash out randomly might be a privacy violation). Google doesn't give two shits about this: they want all of your information. That Google is training people to conflate the process of searching for something with then process of navigating to something is great for them and sucks for Firefox as Firefox kind of has to follow or be screwed and yet it seems a bit antithetical to their mission (though I don't think they even know what their mission is anymore).
(FWIW, the true original sin is the address bar itself: the address bar is a status display of where you are... making it editable is arguably sort of "intuitive"--using the typical kind of "just so" stories that allow people to claim random things are intuitive because the story was flowery enough--but frankly it just makes no sense and causes all kinds of problems. If you fix this, and return to the paradigm that some of the earliest browsers have, I think some of the other things the omnibar does are less awkward, and the "out" for true navigation wouldn't be affected as navigation would feel entirely unlike searching: it would become intuitive that these are separate concepts.)
(Also: the fact that I am unhealthy is not because I don't want to know how to be healthy or because I am not prioritizing understanding it... it is because most of the time I can't for the life of me figure it out even in consultation with doctors, and when I do know things--such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it because I injured myself a couple years ago and I am now somewhat depressed over it. I point this out because it is very different from not knowing or not caring to know: a life un-analyzed and without curiosity at every level of scale and in every interaction would seem to me to be a life wasted. If you truly don't know anything about how a car works, I recommend spending some time to learn: it's fun! Tim isn't like the mechanic ever figured out what was wrong with my car until I finally pulled the error code of the ECU myself and rubbed it in his face. Learn to play at least one musical instrument of every class so that you can extrapolate the rest. Study linguistics as early and as often as you can in life so you can at least appreciate the beauty of other languages even if you don't choose to become fluent. Avoid hiring people to do things for you until you know how to judge if they did a good job, and decide how you wish things to be done before letting other people tell you what they like and then don't back down!)
Oh it was definitely a slippery slope argument, in the form of an analogy. You analogy went as far as saying trash and mail are the same, you are aware of that? Clearly, that is absurd and is using a case of an extreme. Mixing trash and mail, or trash and recycling, and sorting them later is obviously an absurd process. Mixing bottles and cardboard in one recycling bin is not absurd. But your analogy was clearly attempting to conflate all of the above, and I'd be going easy on you if I didn't bother to point that out.
Clearly the Bookmarks "star icon UI" is physically located in the omnibar, but when I said "settings and bookmarks", that clearly wasn't what I meant- I meant modifying the settings and bookmarks through typing a command in the omnibar the way you'd type a URL or search query. Bookmarks are not in the omnibar the way you can type "INSERT INTO bookmarks SELECT current_website FROM current_window" into the omnibar to add a bookmark. You can't change the settings "UPDATE settings SET setting_value=black WHERE setting_name=theme" by typing into the omnibar.
However, neither of my previous 2 paragraphs really refute any of your points, they're just clarifications. Pointing out that you made a slippery slope fallacy in an analogy doesn't refute your point, and whether Bookmarks are considered "in the omnibar" or not is orthogonal to the discussion. I agree wit the paragraph on "the true original sin", but that's a different note as well.
So, returning to the main issue: I think the cost issue is a valid point, but then everything has a cost. Even putting bottles and cans in the same recycling bin would incur a cost. Then the end question becomes "is it worth incurring this cost?". For a lot of people, they are willing to pay the taxpayer cost to have their recycling be sorted between the bottles and cans and cardboard etc. Do you have a separate recycling bin for glass bottles, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, etc? Or just one recycling bin? Similarly, there is a cost to giving google a tiny bit of additional information- but not much. Plus, they already have your entire browsing history stored on their servers already. Try going to some webpages on Chrome, going to a different device, and check the browser history on the 2nd device- it'll be synced with the first device. So on Chrome, there's no additional privacy cost to combining the url and search bar. Even if you use firefox, there's not a lot of information being leaked with the omnibar that accidentally googled something that was supposed to be an intranet site. For the consumer that doesn't know the difference between a URL and a search, they probably aren't running some sites on their local network anyways.
Considering how low the cost is, I'd say a sizable chunk of people who oppose merging the address bar and the search bar do it out of a purely principled stance where they cannot accept any cost greater than 0, not even 0.00001. I'm not sure if this is a logical position to take, although it makes sense as a philosophical perspective, at least. The other chunk of people are just using it as an excuse to back up a philosophy of "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy", which makes even less sense logically (again, see: brain surgeons, grandparents) or philosophically.
On that note, I absolutely hate the quote "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned". It's one of those cynical quips that just makes the person saying it seem smart, but actually leads you away from the truth. People massively overestimate the concept of a tabula rasa, and not all knowledge is learned. One example I can use against (a good percentage) of tech people is exercise at the gym. If you've ever done squats/bench/deadlift, you know the importance of having a good form. If your form is wrong, it will "feel wrong"- this is something that even absolute beginners at a gym notice, even if they don't have a trainer telling them exactly what is the right form. Another one, (a more interesting subject on the state of the human brain), is observing how people react to certain drugs like acid. Amusingly, novices to psychedelics are always convinced that whatever thought they've just come up with is some groundbreaking revelation, when it's usually something that's been thought of many times before.
> such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it
Isn't this inherently more lazy and/or worse? This would be like someone who knew what a URL is, and then purposefully choosing to search up items in the Firefox URL bar anyways. At least not bothering to learn is excusable- again, I don't really need my brain surgeon to know how a URL works and understand making a DNS query for an infranet site works. But philosophically, this seems like throwing your trash in your mailbox and being okay with it because it would disappear anyways (excuse my slippery slope analogy, heh). And also I can possibly argue that you don't know that much about your health, anyways- for a human body to stay healthy, it needs more than just walking. Putting heavier loads to build muscles (maybe not specifically for hypertrophy, but certainly not just LISS cardio) is important, especially for your back. Also, sustained high intensity cardio is important for your health as well.
> If we had tentacles, door handles probably would look more different.
I would love to see a virtual reality app that plays with different organism layouts, and solving the usability issues.
There is a lot of great sci-fi that tries to consider how a world would be designed for non-humanoids, or mixed aliens, or the reverse archaeological problem of calculating how aliens look from what they have left behind. I am struggling to think of any sci-fi that makes you deeply think about usability.
"The Galaxy, and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers (Book 4 in the Wayfarers Series) not only deals with a mixed alien usability environment, it also passes an alien Bechdel test of sorts.
The whole Wayfarers series is amazing in my opinion.
Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend.
There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experience in many important ways, and trying to pretend it is only burdens the user with inconsistent mental models that don't allow them to navigate and grow their intuition.
The way I see it, it is the failure of UX design that it tries to hide the nature of computers - instead of making it apparent, so that the users can learn and internalize the important axioms of this different world. Intuition needs to be calibrated to the underlying reality for it to be useful.
> Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.
There's few things in the world that have no learning curve. Almost everything is learned. Almost everything that's important in life is learned either through direct training, or picked up over time from exposure. This is where every UX designer inventing their own "simplifying" abstractions is hurting users: nobody is training them, but software is so inconsistent nowadays that they don't get to learn from exposure either.