Graham McNicoll

If you have ever seen a kid use an iPad, you have watched a perfect UX. A child seeing it literally for the first time can push and zoom and scroll. Apple nailed the interface so completely that someone with zero context just gets it. It is so intuitive that that is now the default UX for touch screens. Most products would fail that test badly. And most teams have no idea, because internal testing always passes... Everyone in the building already knows where everything is. Your preconceptions quietly fill in every gap the interface leaves. Then it ships, real users hit those gaps, and the confusion shows up later as a bounce rate, or metric, that someone has to explain. It is quite interesting, actually. Old people and really young people, without those preconceptions, are usually great for user testing. They cannot lean on habits carried over from a hundred similar products. The interface has to actually carry them. And when it cannot, you just learned something your whole team was incapable of seeing. So before your next release, put it in front of someone who has never seen it and just watch. I would love to hear which products fail this test for you. There are some spectacular ones out there.