I don't like the word at all when describing interfaces. It's an overly broad term that in my experience doesn't tend to lead to very good conversations about what's good or bad. Case in point, we recently did a complete UI make-over at $JOB and the bossman keeps referring to it as the new 'more intuitive UI'. We moved a few buttons around and changed some font sizes, but the most visible change is the completely new colour palette. So yeah.
I'd also argue that nobody is born with an intuition to work a DAW or any other piece of software, and in that sense I think it's just a misleading term.
I think there are much better words to use to talk about whether a UI is successful or not: "Familiar" is a good word, because then you can ask "familiar to whom" and have a good conversation about what kind of users you have, their backgrounds, how much work you expect them to put into learning your software, etc. "Internally consistent" is another thing you can talk about and to some extent quantify. Being "discoverable" is another thing where you can talk about the balances between having everything right in front of you and a complete information overload. And of course, you can't really get around whether or not a UI is attractive, displaying good colour sense and being visually balanced and such. While you can certainly make pretty things that are impossible to understand, I would tend to argue that there is a bare minimum of prettiness needed to make something that's friendly and engaging.
(PS: Thank you very much for Ardour, it is a remarkable piece of software.)
I'd also argue that nobody is born with an intuition to work a DAW or any other piece of software, and in that sense I think it's just a misleading term.
I think there are much better words to use to talk about whether a UI is successful or not: "Familiar" is a good word, because then you can ask "familiar to whom" and have a good conversation about what kind of users you have, their backgrounds, how much work you expect them to put into learning your software, etc. "Internally consistent" is another thing you can talk about and to some extent quantify. Being "discoverable" is another thing where you can talk about the balances between having everything right in front of you and a complete information overload. And of course, you can't really get around whether or not a UI is attractive, displaying good colour sense and being visually balanced and such. While you can certainly make pretty things that are impossible to understand, I would tend to argue that there is a bare minimum of prettiness needed to make something that's friendly and engaging.
(PS: Thank you very much for Ardour, it is a remarkable piece of software.)