Those metaphors, what is now the basis of our ‘intuition’, developed in a different era. The original Mac human interface wasn’t, and for anyone coming from a text and keyboard environment it was entirely novel and something of a shock, until we had grasped the metaphors involved. There are times, though, when interface design cannot be conservative. However much Apple might pretend that iCloud is an integral part of our Home folder, for the majority of users it isn’t, and dragging behaviour to and from iCloud is inconsistent with the established rule. I still criticise Apple’s Finder interface to iCloud for breaking the overriding rule that dragging a file within the same volume moves it, while dragging it between different volumes copies it. This is good in some ways, as it invokes the principle of consistency, one of the overriding concerns in human interface design. Relying on prior learning and established interface metaphors makes our opinions conservative. Those of us who speak or write about human interfaces have invariably been using them for many years, and what we are judging them on isn’t the intuitive, but what we have learned and our expectation of similar metaphors. When we put an iPad in my father’s hands, he was lost in amazement and incapable of doing anything with it except gazing at it in wonder. My best test for whether human interface behaviours are truly intuitive is to take someone, like my late father, who has essentially no experience of using computers. Among my favourites is the ring-pull can, where pulling the ring is the only obvious action, and leads the user straight to the solution of how to open the can. There are good examples of truly intuitive design. In the context of Stage Manager, it’s also dangerous unless we realise that next to nothing about macOS is actually intuitive, in the sense that we can comprehend it immediately and without reasoning or prior learning. Of all the concepts in human interface design, it’s by far the most maligned. Whenever we discuss the human interface, there’s one word that’s sure to follow, intuitive.
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