Every brief I have ever received contains the word “intuitive.” Sometimes it appears once, near the end, like a signature. Sometimes it appears four times in one paragraph, which I have learned to read as a cry for help. “We want it to be intuitive.” “Users should find it intuitive.” “Can we make the checkout a bit more intuitive?” Nobody has ever written, “We want it to be confusing.” That is the strange thing about the word. It sounds like a requirement, but it rules nothing out.
“Intuitive” is not a requirement. It is a mood.
In the course, it arrives around week two. A student presents a flow, someone asks why the button is there, and the answer is, “Because it’s more intuitive.” I ask: more intuitive for whom, doing what, after having done what before? The room becomes very polite. The problem is not that the word is wrong. The problem is that it ends the conversation exactly where it should begin. It is not quite a reason. Not quite an opinion. Not quite a fact about users. It is a fact about the speaker: this feels obvious to me. And what feels obvious to the person who made it is the least reliable data in the building. You have seen the screen forty times. You named the buttons. Of course it feels intuitive. So does your own handwriting.
With company teams, it gets more interesting. When eight people in a room say “intuitive,” there are usually eight different products in their heads. The head of sales means fewer clicks. The developer means it follows platform conventions. The founder means it looks like the app they secretly admire. Everyone nods, because everyone agrees, because nobody has actually said anything. So I have started banning the word. Gently, and for one hour only. This is not a policy. It is a hygiene measure. I still use the word myself, mostly in emails I write too quickly. But for one session, anyone who wants to say “intuitive” has to replace it with a sentence about a person doing something. “A first-time visitor finds the return policy without scrolling.” “Someone who has used any banking app can send money without reading a single label.” What follows is mild chaos, and then the most useful hour of the project. Half the sentences contradict each other. A few turn out to be testable by Friday. One or two reveal that the team was never designing for the same person in the first place.
The word was hiding a disagreement. Removing it lets the disagreement out, and that is where the work starts.
Margin note: In your next meeting, every time someone says “intuitive,” write it down. At the end, ask them to turn each one into a sentence about a person doing something. Then count how many different people the room was designing for.
I’ve turned this into a one-page worksheet for teams. Download The Intuitive Audit →
