[m12k]

Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on paradigms that others have established as the norm means meeting users where they are.

[robertlagrant]

Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."

[rachofsunshine]

As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one before.

Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to physical concepts users did understand ("oh, I have a physical card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes sense!").

[moomoo11]

Wow that’s cool. I remember my dad was addicted to solitaire lol

[carlmr]

He was playing the tutorial all along.

[robinsonb5]

> was once...

...and is rapidly becoming so again, hence modern UIs treating it as a second-class citizen.

[hnick]

Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.

[xinayder]

While it makes sense, it really isn't the case if the market leaders have shitty design principles.

Apple stopped bundling an iPhone charger on recent models. Samsung did the same, but realized the backlash was enormous, and offered the charger for free (instead of being an additional purchase) if you bought a recent model.

Same with headphone jack, although it was received much more negatively and I'm pretty sure Samsung didn't give a damn about most of its users complaining they now had to buy new headphones (they mitigated this a bit by offering a USB-C headphone on their flagship devices for a while) to listen to music in their devices.

It's an outdated line of thought to think you need your designs to feel familiar to the user, even if the competitors have dark or annoying design patterns, rather than convenient. The average user is no longer a tech illiterate person. We should stop assuming common things like opting out of marketing/AI data training should be left for advanced users only and make it available for everyone, with ease.

[krisoft]

I don't think you are quite talking about the same kind of design here.

You are talking about very high level choices. (Do we bundle a charger with every new phone? does the phone have a jack?) Those are not really good examples where familiarity is important.

The argument about the importance of familiarity is in the UX paradigm of the phone. Think about the task of pairing a phone with a wifi network. You usually do that by unlocking the phone, finding the settings (which is most likely under an icon resembling a gear, or a spanner, even though neither of those things had anything to do with setting up wifi). Then inside the settings you have a long list of things you can set, you can move between them by dragging the screen up and down. You find the menu item for wifi (probably has a wifi logo, or radio waves icon) you click that. Then you see something where you can turn the wifi radio on or off, and you see a list of SSID's you can join. You click the one you want to join, and it asks you for the password associated with the network. Usually you can tap the password field and an on-screen keyboard appears where you can type the password in.

This is by and far the way to connect to a wifi on any modern smart phones. This is the "familiar".

To better illustrate what "lack of familiarity" would mean imagine a phone where instead of finding the wifi settings in a "settings" menu you can connect to a new wifi in the maps app. Why? Wifi networks are location dependent, so why not? These designers decided that wifi networks appear as small colourful dots on the map. Then imagine if after tapping your selection from the list of SSID's you would need to push a button on the side of the phone to "accept" it. Otherwise it won't connect. Then imagine that instead of showing you an on-screen keyboard to type in the password you need to morse-code tap the password in by tapping the back of the phone. The phone would indicate this to you by showing an icon of a drum kit.

This is what "lack of familiarity" would look like. Clearly this imaginary phone would be very hard to use, and the users would reward the manufacturer's creative thinking with a lot of returns and complaints.

[robinsonb5]

Another example of this: when I bought my current phone it took me well over a week to figure out how to put it on silent, because the option to do it is no longer on the control panel you sweep down from the top of the screen.

No, now I have to actually adjust the volume to make the volume indicator / slider pop up, and then the mute button is visible.

If the volume slider was accesible through the regular on-screen interface, I might have looked for a mute button alongside it. But pressing the volume up / down buttons didn't occur to me, because those buttons are for nudging the volume one step in either direction, not for making hidden UI elements appear.

[CRConrad]

Aha, you too have a OnePlus? :-)

AFAICR, it took me much longer than a week.

[xinayder]

I understand, I couldn't scratch my head to think of dark design patterns done by big companies nowadays when it comes to UX. One thing I can think of is how Samsung keeps moving away common settings from Android to new menus in new One UI versions. I remember when I updated to Android 14 and I just couldn't find where to configure my battery charger settings.

[CRConrad]

> The average user is no longer a tech illiterate person.

On the contrary, I think the average user is nowadays a much more tech illiterate person than they used to be.