What makes a visual truly intuitive? Is it instinctive, universal, emotional, or just familiar through repetition? Here, we look at the spectrum of visual learnability: from visuals grounded in shared human experience to those that are arbitrary or technical. Not all visuals are created equal. And not all visuals are learned and acquired with the same ease.

Truly Intuitive Visuals

Some visuals tap into our instincts or lived experience:

•             🔥 = fire or danger: Fire causes harm.

•             💧 = water or liquid: We know it through touch and necessity. Water is life.

•             👁️ = vision: A body part, universally recognised.

•             ☀️ = sun: Warmth, day, energy.

These visuals are not taught, they are felt. Across cultures and education levels, they are interpreted largely in the same way.

Key Point: This type of visual is effective across many groups, including those with low literacy or language barriers.

Familiar But Learned

Some icons feel intuitive, but only because we have been exposed to them repeatedly.

Consider:

• 🛑 Stop sign

• 🚫 Circle-slash

• ✅ Tick

• ❤️ Heart (symbol, not anatomy)

• 💊 Pill (as medicine)

The are conventions that are entrenched. But they are not instinct. They require formal learning, such as a part of the process of learning to drive or digital onboarding, or they are reinforced by design systems. An example of this could be a red cross on packaging that would be likely to be interpreted as ‘something to do with health’ (or Tonga or Switzerland!) These visuals can be powerful. But they can also be dangerous if they are assumed to be globally understood, especially in health or legal contexts.

Visuals that are Abstract and Technical

This category includes symbols with little or no visual relationship to their meaning:

• 🧬 DNA strand: scientific abstraction

• ISO safety symbols (☣️, ⚠️): regulation-based

• 📄 = document/file (symbolic of paper, not meaning)

• 🚻 Toilet: an abstracted gender symbol pair

• 💉 = vaccination, injection, intravenous.

These are visuals that require instruction, glossary support or repeated use. Only then can they begin to be understood by users. The best strategy for these is to pair them with text, such as hover-over explanations or verbal onboarding.

Recap on Designing for Learnability

In previous articles we have emphasised the need to prioritise the learnability of visuals over any other factors. We recap here the key points:

·       Prioritise clarity over cleverness.

·       Reinforce symbols with text labels.

·       Visuals need to be culturally aware.

·       Visuals need to be tested across demographics.

·       Repeat and teach visuals consistently.

True intuitiveness is rare. Most visuals that work do so because we have all learned them. Good design does not only aim for instant comprehension, it creates and builds it. Designers and communicators need to understand the spectrum of learnability. By doing this, we can create visuals that actually communicate, across borders, literacy levels and cultures.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025