As a web application developer, I am confronted with this concept regularly. Salesman push it. Managers taut it. Programmers dread it. The mythical ability of a an application to be understood and used without any training whatsoever.

It is mythical. There is no such thing as intuitive. People will point at Apple’s interface, at the iPhone, at iWeb (the application I am using to type in this blog), or even at a telephone and say, That’s intuitive.

Yeah RIGHT.

No offense to Apple (because if anyone gets close to intuitive its Apple), but all interfaces are are learned. A stop sign may seem intuitive, but only because you have seen it a lot of times.

If you have never seen a behavior before. If you have no reference for that behavior, it must be learned. There is no way to make it INTUITIVE.

You people in the marketing department, keep on using it in the promotional material. Hey it works. I like things that work. Just don’t come back and tell me “It’s not intuitive enough”. Show me how the behavior is inconsistent with other behaviors and I will shake your hand. Tell me a person needs to be able to use a product with no knowledge of what they are doing and I will call you nasty names (it might be under my breath).