Expand­ing on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learn­ing cycles and so-called ‘intu­itive’ inter­faces, Vicky Teinaki dis­cusses the ‘knowl­edge matrix’ and makes this inter­est­ing point that I feel almost embar­rassed to have not thought about previously:

Dig­i­tal devices can never be inher­ently ‘intu­itive’, as the fact that they deal in abstrac­tion auto­mat­i­cally means that actions must be arbi­trary. (An aside: for those who argue that much of ges­tural and time based inter­ac­tions are intu­itive, remem­ber that this assumes a West­ern way of look­ing at space and time. Anthro­pol­o­gists would tell you that there are other ways.) In other words, inter­faces aren’t ‘intu­itive’, they’re ‘intu­ited’: before that, there’s noth­ing ‘intu­itive’ about them at all.

If you’re won­der­ing what Vicky means by this, this excerpt from Daniel Gilbert’s Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness may enlighten you:

When we draw a time line, those of us who speak Eng­lish put the past on the left, those of us who speak Ara­bic put the past on the right, and those of us who speak Man­darin put the past on the bottom.

It goes with­out say­ing that how we believe peo­ple read our sites is based on cul­tural assumptions.

via Devan Gold­stein