Full paper.
The concept of the intuitive has been central to HCI practices for a long time, as is evident in both textbooks and research articles. However, while the notion of the intuitive is so often referred to and used in the literature, relatively little work has been done with respect to what the notion actually means. We carried out a literature analysis of 76 articles published at the CHI conference between 2004 and 2016, all discussing or claiming to design for the intuitive. The articles were approached through the lens of discourse analysis, and an inductive reading was carried out to identify different perspectives on the notion. Six different perspectives on the intuitive were found. With few exceptions, the articles do not contain any discussions of functionally impaired users. We argue that the use of the term in the articles is exclusionary, rendering that which it does not consider (those with functional impairments) invisible.