There’s something interesting about disconnecting natural and intuitive. They really aren’t the same thing, yet I have often assumed they are. If you look up intuitive, you’ll find synonyms: natural, innate. And if you look up natural, you’ll find synonyms of spontaneous, unaffected, genuine, unmannered. So far so good.
But if you delve a little deeper and explore “intuition” it gets murkier.
Intuition is:
- direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension.Â
- a fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way.Â
- a keen and quick insight.Â
- the quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.
Natural is a whole bunch of things, including (selections of definitions not in order):
- Existing in or formed by nature
- Growing spontaneously
- free from affectation or constraint
- arising easily or spontaneously
- based on what is learned from nature rather than on revelation
- any person or thing that is or is likely or certain to be very suitable to and successful in an endeavor without much training or difficulty.
- and (my favorite…) In craps, a winning combination of seven or eleven made on the first cast.
Nathan Moody of Stimulant was speaking to a bunch of us at Adaptive Path, and he was clear in his thinking: “Natural does not equal intuitive.” He was talking about large-scale interactive displays, and how the physical movements of gesture and body motion were natural…yet when faced with a taller-than-God interactive display, people had no clue how to interact with it.
Good to remember.
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Working in a user experience company, I use a bunch of words to describe user-centered design: user experience, user engagement, interaction design, experience design, there’s a lot of words out there that triangulate the ideas around experience strategy and design, and they almost always are about the Web.
That’s why it was wonderful to hear Jesse advocate for designing for human engagement. Funny how a slightly different words can open up a world of possiblities. Thinking about the best experiences I’ve had…with a product, a place, a site, an activity…I can’t think of one that wasn’t smack dab in the center of human engagement.
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When Ryan said…”it wasn’t innovative…but it was innervative” It got me thinking…first of all, I didn’t really know what innervative meant, but I thought it had something to do with reaching out, stretching across, activating…like nerves. But it was an interesting idea, a great contender for the favorite of the week.
When I went to look it up, I found 2 words, “enervate” and “innervate” and the I didn’t know which one Ryan meant.
Innervate :
1. to communicate nervous energy to; stimulate through nerves.
2. to furnish with nerves; grow nerves into.
Enervate :
1. to deprive of force or strength; destroy the vigor of; weaken. Â
Totally different meanings.
I went with enervate (gut feeling, but sadly not what Ryan meant) because I think that’s how businesses that can’t innovate think: if you can’t out-think the competition, then focus on squashing it into the ground by any means necessary. That’s a sad thing. But interesting to explore in a sketch. That’s where the anvil comes in…
updateÂ
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Here’s the re-do of the week with what Ryan really meant, just to balance things out.
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Peter blogged about his empathy quotient, and a bunch of us joined in the test. I ranked low, which didn’t really surprise me. I was a 36 out of 80. Apparently I don’t care about people around me. Which is funny, because I think I do.
Then I took the Systemizing test and realized what all those brain parts that aren’t being empathetic are spending their time doing…they are looking at the world and being curious about how it works. My score on this was 73. The authors of the test had this to say about the score:
“51 – 80 is very high (three times as many people with Asperger Syndrome score in this range, compared to typical men, and almost no women score in this range)”
Great. So I’m an asperger guy trapped in a woman’s body. Thanks, test.
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