How Inutive are Your Designs?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Most would agree that good designs are intuitive or easy to understand. But how do you create intuitive designs? In cognitive design we can reformulate that question in more specific terms and appeal to the latest scientific thinking to try and answer it. More specifically:
What are the cognitive processes associated with intuition and how can we modify our designs (add, refine, and delete features and functions) to support or accelerate those processes?
A new book just published, Foundations for Tracing Intuition, provides a great overview of the cognitive science and modeling techniques needed to answer this question. The author offers a four-process theory of intuition and shows how modeling techniques ranging from talk-aloud protocols to physiological measurements can be used to understand it. This is a must read for the research-oriented cognitive designer. I will be blogging more on the specifics in February.
