Thursday, 3 December 2015

Day 412, Red flag terms in interaction design



Glancing through my course notes from Fundamentals of Interaction Design I was reminded of 'red flag terms'.

Red flags are terms that claim to evidence sensitivity to human needs.  Whereas what they actually do are reflect a complete lack of understanding of people.

They should be avoided.

Examples of red flags are:

Fool-proof

User-friendly

Intuitive


Some implications of these red flags are:

Fool-proof - you think your customers are fools.

User-friendly - the product holds users by the hand and forces them to do things one step at a time, in prescribed order, whether they like it or not.

Intuitive - ‘so automatic it is not conscious’, but almost everything we call intuitive, such as walking or using a pencil, took years of practice.


'easy to use' - another red flag term



I'm pretty sure I've used these terms in real life, maybe I should have paid more attention after I'd written my notes.



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