Intuition

It is impossible for anything related to using computers to be intuitive. Every aspect of it is either directly learned behavior, or extrapolated by reference to other learned behavior.

Most of the issues described in the article are not the result of unintuitive designs per se, but the result of inconsistent designs within the same context. Inconsistency makes it difficult to extrapolate patterns out of particular experiences that can be applied elsewhere. But resolving this is just a matter of reconciling interfaces to consistent design patterns.

The idea that the concept of a disk image is somehow inherently unintuitive is not really valid; and, in fact, the process of using a disk image and using a zip file to install applications are really two variations of the same thing.

"Disk image" is just a particular type of file archive in the Mac world. It's misnamed, but that's not a problem for novice users who don't otherwise know what a disk image is; it's a problem for experienced users who know what "disk image" means everywhere else.

The author seems to make the assumption that manipulating a downloaded ZIP file is more “intuitive” than a disk image. I could have written the same article with the opposite assumption with equal validity. (Some apps arrive as a disk image INSIDE a ZIP file…no idea what those people are thinking.)

There is a long MacOS history and evolution here starting with “you run the app from the floppy disk it lives on”. The disk image with the handy Applications alias makes perfect sense as the end result of that evolution, if you just know what a disk image, an alias, and the Applications folder are. I mean, the arrow even literally tells you what to do. Unpack a ZIP file and it just sits there.

There was a discontinuity in this history when the App Store was imported from sandboxed iOS device world where none of these mechanisms are present (well, now there’s Files, but that’s hardly the same). It tries to hide the entire mechanism from you and does a pretty good job — just press “Get” and run the app from the Launcher, just like iOS.

None of this is “intuitive” but some of it may be more or less familiar and/or make “obvious” use of mechanisms you are expected to understand (like folders, disk images, ZIP files, and the App Store).

The message here may be that the prevalence of iOS means Mac users shouldn’t be expected to understand folders and aliases. Maybe so, but there has to be some baseline knowledge of what the direct manipulation is manipulating, or the whole GUI exercise is pointless.

(BTW, totally agree with Windows users being gun-shy, particularly if they’ve experienced the fragmentation-grenade style Windows installers that are still around after multiple decades of Microsoft trying to rein developers in…)

The “drag app to app folder” mechanic feels like the UAC prompt of windows. It’s more like a “You are doing something substantial, are you sure of it?” thing for me. Never thought of it as unintuitive.

“Mounting a disk image” is the dumbest thing that apple ever came up with and failed to fix to this day. Just read that sentence out loud, none of it makes any sense to the famous “mere mortals”.

Dragging CD icon from the desktop to a Trash Bin to eject a CD-ROM - that made even more sense and was more intuitive.

"Intuitive" and "easy to use" is 90% familiarity.