Intuition guides our everyday lives, most applications and devices that we run into in different situations are ones we are not familiar with, yet we are able to interact with them and intuitively figure out how to utilize them. This can be attributed to unspoken rules that we have gotten used to over the years a button is to be pushed, and a knob is to be turned. These are affordances derived from our intuition and guided by signifiers and feedback to design devices usable by everyone. An interaction that I would say drives me crazy, due to it’s lack of all that is aforementioned would be trying to find my way around in the public transportation of some locations, especially underground trains where there are not enough signs signifying which train is coming or which platform to take. Often the maps are even cluttered or outdated making it even harder to wayfind my way around. This lack of clear signifiers and feedback makes it difficult to form a reliable mental model of the system, making it impossible to wayfind intuitively without searching things up or asking someone else around you.
When it comes to interactive media, this did open my eyes to the lack of intuition or clear instructions and signifiers to how to use my system and navigate my work so far. Most of the them depend on the user having previously provided knowledge through reading the concept or speaking to me. For example, this week my project has an interaction where the user can switch a book through clicking it, which can only be found by chance by clicking the books if not having read the concept. However, the switching of the book could count as feedback clarifying that the action of clicking does make a change. Moving forward I’d like to make my work more intuitive to interact with where the user is able to identify the purpose and the next move upon coming across a piece of mine. I’m looking to explore the possibility of strong signifiers through visual cues or micro-interactions that lead the user naturally without their having to be told beforehand. Such cues would create a seamless and engaging experience for users where they are able to independently go out and play and interact with the system. At the end of the day, the works we are creating are very user-focused most of the time and keeping their perspective in mind might be more important than in most other art forms.