Intuitive Technology

The other day one of the people at work approached me with a very important document that was to be presented later in the day to an important audience. There were several changes required in the document and I proceeded to tell the employee all the changes that I wanted in the document.

At the very last moment, I also commented that the document had been stapled incorrectly and went on to show her the way in which I wanted it to be stapled. A colleague sitting next to me was watching the whole thing grinned and made a sarcastic remark saying that he had no problems in looking at any document that was stapled in whatever way.

This triggered a thought in me. Was I being an ass or was there more to my spontaneous remark? I could not help but link my observation to something that goes by the name of intuitive technology.

Ever wondered why they have ridges on bags of potato chips? So that you can tear open the bag without using your teeth! Then there are camera tripods that one can operate without even bothering to refer to the manual. Or the “file flow process” of a loan application which seamlessly flows from one function to another without people having to think too much.

Websites that use intuitive technology have buttons and links at the most likely places making them easy to navigate.

The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced that what seems so easy and intuitive happens after a lot of research on things like time and motion study. You sit down and explore all possible options of doing the same thing – say opening a packet of chips. What becomes the industry standard is the easiest most convenient (and also the most cost effective) way of doing it. Engineers study such concepts in subjects like Value Engineering. Business Process Re-engineering too has a similar objective – to make things simpler, remove non value adding steps and to make things at a certain level intuitive.

So then, intuitive technology itself is not intuitive. One has to go through a grind to come up with things that we don’t even think while doing. Which is why, if I ask someone to staple the pages in such a way that it helps the reader turn the pages in an intuitive manner, am I asking for too much?