Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering has some interesting commentary on What makes a design seem intuitive.
The distance between current knowledge and target knowledge has a technical name: “The Gap”. (Subsequently, an entire chain of clothing stores was named after it!)
The Knowledge Gap is where design happens. We don’t need to design to the left of current knowledge point, because it’s all stuff the user already knows. And we don’t need to design stuff to the right of the target knowledge point, since the user won’t be needing that information (for this task, at least). We only need to design the interface for the space in between current knowledge and target knowledge. (See a picture of the Knowledge Gap here: )
Leave a Reply