What does "intuitive" mean in terms of software and user interface?

Quite often I see x piece of software described as intuitive or not intuitive. Does this mean good or bad in general terms or does it mean a personal preference? This drives me crazy. When someone says LibreOffice writer is so intuitive, I just love it, or I cannot stand LibreOffice writer because it’s just not intuitive, what does that really mean?

I would argue that it’s all personal preference and the word intuitive is not very useful. It seems to imply that everyone has the exact same expectations about software and user interfaces and that is not realistic to me.

What does everyone think?

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In alot of cases I think it means that the workflow is similar enough to it’s windows or mac equivilant that people moving over will feel relatively at home using it. Intuitive nearly always assumes some previous experience with something similar. For example the first time I opened ardour I wonered how I would ever learn this having never opened a daw before. But when my son wanted to try reaper it was so much easier, not because reaper is more intuitive but because we had already used something similar.

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I recall putting on a presentation for OpenOffice (probably 20 years ago or less) for a school system. It was basically me saying, it works like other office suites, but you will need to get your own clip art. You would think I told them to convert to a religion. Intuitive when pertaining to software just means the user will not have to do work to use it.

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Mom is intuitive. She wakes you up in the morning. She cooks your meals. She washes your clothes. She picks up after you.

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There is such a thing as “objective” intuitive, but also such a thing as “subjective” intuitive.

“Subjective” intuitive is something that someone can handle immediately, but only because they’ve done something similar before. Someone else who hasn’t had the same experiences before will find the same thing confusing and counterintuitive.
A prime example of something subjectively intuitive is anything that comes out of Apple. Their fanboys think it’s intuitive/easy that you leave an app by swiping up the lower end of the screen (something objectively not intuitive at all, hand an iPhone to someone who has never seen one before and they won’t be able to figure out how to do anything!). If Crapple introduced a new action that is triggered by throwing your device into the air, catching it, then turning it upside down and tapping the SOS morse code on the fingerprint sensor 3 times and then farting into the microphone while repeatedly swiping down, their fanboys would find that easy/intuitive too, because they got used to it, doing it all the time. Nobody else would figure it out.
This is not just limited to Crapple (even though they’re the most extreme example of something that is only subjectively intuitive), it also includes such ideas as “double-click to open”,

But then there is also “objective” intuitive: Show it to anyone who has never seen a similar application or device before, and they can figure out how to use it in little time.

I’d argue that user interfaces from the 1990s tend to be more objectively intuitive than their modern counterparts. It’s relatively clear that if you want to do save, you’d navigate to a “File” menu and then pick the “Save” option in it. It’s far less obvious that you have to click a “hamburger menu” to see available options.

It is objectively intuitive to figure out how to navigate an application launcher that gives you categories like “System”, “Games”, … and then lists applications inside them - it’s far less obvious how to handle something that just shows you a few giant icons representing the most commonly used things and expecting you to drag the menu to the left if you want to see other options.

I would argue that objectively, Apple and GNOME are the least “intuitive” user interfaces ever developed (yet obviously their fanboys can handle them because they’re subjectively intuitive after you wrapped your brain around their ideas long enough) - among other things because of plainly stupid things like their wrong button order.

Because of the way language works, if you just want a positive or negative answer, it’s a “yes-or-no question”, and not a “no-or-yes question”. (This is not only true for English, but also for very different languages, including but not limited to Chinese, Russian, German, French, Italian and Spanish).
But GNOME and Crapple go out of their way to make their interfaces counterintuitive – “Do you really want to do this?” “[No]” or “[Yes]”?

Yes, I know that their (lack of) thinking behind it is “you shouldn’t actually read, just click the lower-right button all the time” - but that’s again not in line with how a brain works (can you really look at a button saying “yes” or “no” even for a fraction of a second without having read that word?).

Of course, if you want to know what GNOME will look like a few years from now, try https://userinyerface.com/

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Wow. Thanks to everyone who answered and especially thanks to bero. I did look at the gcide definition through dictd before posting but it doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining about differences between objective and subjective.