Beyond sketching features: UI design as natural, intuitive human conversations

Many teams drive the initial design process by what amounts to sketching features. The focus is the physical placement of features to achieve mechanical usability. Getting the UI to be simple, intuitive, and achieve user goals comes later through refinement and iteration, if at all. A better approach would achieve these crucial goals deliberately rather than accidentally. A user interface is essentially a conversation between users and technology, so we can make better design decisions by…