Marketing Jargon: What is Intuitive?

Intuitive is a word that gets thrown around a lot. You will see it in press releases, reviews, sales literature, and pretty much on anything that carries some form of interaction. Intuitive interface, intuitive controls, design, layout, well heck just take any word and slap intuitive on it and you can be your own marketing team.

Webster defines intuitive as “directly apprehended” and “known or perceived by intuition.” I am sure that last definition really helped.

Unlike most marketing jargon, I do not utterly distain intuitive. Although I think it has been used way too often, it is a word that should be the basic goal of one of the most important pieces of a Web Host’s offerings and that is the control panel. It should also be the basic goal of Web Designers when it comes to their design.

What is Intuitive? I define intuitive as any set of functions that do not require users to learn a new skill set. For control panels, if you take any computer user and sit them in front of a control panel they should be able to use all the functionality of that control panel without having to look at a manual or use the help icon. That is intuitive. Now I know what you are saying, how can someone with an extremely limited use of the computer actually use all the functionality of a control panel that a system administration would use? Parallels solved this problem in their Panels 10 SMB edition by adding user roles. If an employee only knows how to use email then all they get is email on their control panel.

For Web designers a web site is intuitive if a surfer can find what they are looking for without having to double back. That is intuitive. This includes but is not limited to the inclusion of multiple avenues of search/browsing (categories, tags, search bar, wiki-links, etc), landing pages for ads and news items, reducing the amount of clicks needed to get to descriptions (ie removing things like clicking on a product summary to get a product page and from their getting a full product feature list, then clicking on another link to bring you back to the buy page, and so on), charts and graphs for comparing multiple items, most popular sections, calendarized itemization, and the list goes on.

Intuitive maybe overused, it can end up being senseless marketing jargon, but if you provide services or products on the internet, then intuitive better be your standard.