Martin Heidegger in the 1930s wrote the bible, so to say, on ontology of toolness. He used the example of hammers, as archtypical of tools with good UIs. You don’t have to learn an abstraction to use it. Little kids when first encountering a hammer and without any parental teaching pick up hammer and begin using it, mostly in the intended hammerlike use-case. Heideggerian ‘toolness’, ‘immanence’—‘usability’, if you like—or the ordinary German word ‘verstehen’.

Verstehen basically means ‘thereness’, ‘openness to experience’, or ‘primordial comprehendability’. Those are the most adequate expressions to convey what it really means. The usual English dictionary translation of verstehen is wimpy, though. Usually some lame, card-boardy thing like ‘understanding’, way too cerebral. That’s not what it means. Not primeval enough. Verstehen is seeing a hook-like object and reflexively and instantaneously imagining that you could use it to catch fish, or seeing a sharp-edged object and imagining without any internal discourse or deliberation that “I could kill and eat food with that”. Or seeing a Google search UI or a good videogame UI and knowing immediately how to interact with it to get a good, valuable, winning result.

¶ 8:34 AM