Intuitive gadget? Think again

AP

NOT SO SIMPLE: Even gadgets known as "intuitive" can be hard to use.

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Tech journalists often used the word "intuitive" to describe devices and websites.

Farhad Manjoo, one of the best American technology journalists, said this about Windows 7 on slate.com recently: "[It's] the fastest, most intuitive, and most useful consumer desktop operating system on the market today".

He means it's easy to use, that buttons are in the obvious places and do the things he thinks they ought to do. He's saying he can make the software work instinctively or naturally.

As editor of The Press' technology section, I banned "intuitive" because the word says more about the experience and geekiness of the writer rather than anything useful about the technology. What's intuitive to one person is not instinctive to another.

Take, for example, the qwerty keyboard. I've been teaching my primary school children to type and watching them seek randomly placed letters and punctuation marks is a lesson in frustration; yes, I know the qwerty keyboard was invented for manual typewriters.

And there's nothing intuitive about cut and paste keyboard commands - Control x and Control v - to my elderly parents. They use a mouse and pulldown menus to cut 'n' paste. The mouse is indeed an easier way to instruct a computer. A mouse adds vision to the task. Users can see what they are about to do.

Touchscreen computers promise to improve things even more. Instead of wrestling with a keyboard and mouse, users command the computer by touching the screen with a finger.

The fingertip becomes, in effect, the mouse.

To test the useability of a touchscreen, I loosened my six-year-old son on a HP Touch Smart 300.

I gave him a quick demonstration and he was soon enough opening and closing photos, picking songs from a CD and playing online computer games, all with his fingers.

He can do these things with a mouse and keyboard, but the HP Touch Smart was notably more obvious and fun.

The downside was that few programs are optimised for touchscreens. Want to close Internet Explorer? You still have to click the little X in the top right corner, but it isn't a big enough target for even a little boy's finger. It's easy to minimise or maximise the window by mistake.

Touchscreen computers are promising, but not there yet. Early adopters might flock to them this Christmas, but I'm waiting a few years.

And as for intuitiveness, Windows 7 makes immediate sense only if you've spent days working in Vista. If you're from XP or some other operating system, Windows 7 is going to be a nightmare for weeks.

* HP TouchSmart 300, about $2499. More info at hp.com/touchsmart

- © Fairfax NZ News