[Sigia-l] Counterintuitive

[Listera]

Matthew deStwolinski:

> A lot of things don't match our intuition...been to the edge of our flat world
> lately?

Hey, hey, easy; some of us live there permanently.:-)

Good points on counterintuitive POV.

I usually come in to rescue larger-scale projects as a last resort. So I get
a lengthy briefing at the start given by IAs, designers, PMs, etc. There are
usually elaborate drawing, maps, charts and the like, to show where the user
is at any given moment in the interaction map with respect to the overall
website structure.

After a while, my eyes glaze over and I have to blurt out that users don't
care where they are wrt the uber site architecture. They are there to get
info, conduct a transaction, get entertained, etc. Not to get familiar with
their beloved site map. This is often counterintuitive to people who have
spent months coordinating these interrelationships and minutely documenting
them.

I also remember another episode, (in 1989 and that would be a decade prior
to dotcom :-) when I proposed to a venture capitalist (I don't remember what
they were actually called then) to distribute for free a weekly publication
like what became the TimeOut series, supported by advertising and two forms
of sponsorships which I had partially obtained at the time. He thought I was
an idiot. That business model was not generally known then and it was very
counterintuitive for him to wrap his head around it. His arguments sounded
quite similar in spirit to the ones against eliminating traffic signs.

There's, of course, this:

<http://snipurl.com/bb14>

Ziya
Nullius in Verba