Originally Posted by ragnar

Nowadays intuitive is a lot more of "what mental models and user behaviour the users already know of and therefore would want to reutilize" than "give this design to a tabula rasa mind and see if he learns to use this".

Not saying if this is good or bad, but asking "whether this UI is intuitive" is more like asking whether this UI follows known patterns or not. In theory I could design something really "intuitive" but because it would be very much different from what are the currently known user patterns, there would be a strong initial feeling of "non-intuitiveness", because it differs from the norm.

Then again, designs like these do prove themselves or not over the longer term of use.

Most of it is intuitive; however, the lack of a back button (or any other button for that matter!) meant that sometime you had no clue how to navigate around the device.

For example, to back up from an application or a Web page, you press the very top left of the screen. Unfortunately, there;s no icon there to indicate this functionality, so if you;ve never used the phone before, you;ll have no idea what to do whatsoever!. Of course, you;ll get used to this over time, but it;s unnecessarily confusing

Originally Posted by ragnar

Then again, designs like these do prove themselves or not over the longer term of use.

Originally Posted by SD69

This I respectfully do not agree with. Especially if you are attempting to equate commercial success with successful UI design. There are just too many other factors that relate to product success. It could be lowest common denominator rather than quality that leads to success. Cheap beer sells more than beer which is better but more expensive. People say the Apple Newton design was very good, even though it flopped commercially, etc.

Originally Posted by Laughing Man

True that's why a company like Apple can convince everyone that zooming in via pinching and zooming out via a spreading motion is intuitive (frankly to me it should be the opposite way around if you were going to use these motions).

Originally Posted by mikec

I went into Apple store to try out iPhone, kept rotating the browser to horizontal expecting it to rotate, and it stayed in Portrait, struggled with the on screen keyboard. I left and went back to my very intuitive E71 Symbian device. It has a key for Mail, a key for calendar and a key for Contacts 90% of my use case for a phone covered.

Mike C