DIlEMMA
Chapter 3 Chapter 3
3.4 Interface Metaphors
3 . 4 I N T E R F A C E M E T A P h O R s 79
as the recycle bin (trash can) that sits on the desktop. Logically and culturally (meaning, in the real world), it should be placed under the desk. But users would not have been able to see it because it would have been hidden by the desktop surface. So, it needed to go on the desk- top. While some users found this irksome, most did not find it to be a problem. Once they understood why the recycle bin icon was on the desktop, they simply accepted it being there.
An interface metaphor that has become popular in the last few years is the card. Many of the social media apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, present their content on cards. Cards have a familiar form, having been around for a long time. Just think of how many kinds there are: playing cards, business cards, birthday cards, credit cards, and post- cards to name a few. They have strong associations, providing an intuitive way of organizing limited content that is “card sized.” They can easily be flicked through, sorted, and themed.
They structure content into meaningful chunks, similar to how paragraphs are used to chunk a set of related sentences into distinct sections (Babich, 2016). In the context of the smart- phone interface, the Google Now card provides short snippets of useful information. This appears on and moves across the screen in the way people would expect a real card to do—in a lightweight, paper-based sort of way. The elements are also structured to appear as if they were on a card of a fixed size, rather than, say, in a scrolling web page (see Figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5 Google Now card for restaurant recommendation in Germany Source: Used courtesy of Johannes Schöning
In many cases, new interface metaphors rapidly become integrated into common par- lance, as witnessed by the way people talk about them. For example, parents talk about how much screen time children are allowed each day in the same way they talk more generally about spending time. As such, the interface metaphors are no longer talked about as familiar terms to describe less familiar computer-based actions; they have become everyday terms in their own right. Moreover, it is hard not to use metaphorical terms when talking about technology use, as they have become so ingrained in the language that we use to express our- selves. Just ask yourself or someone else to describe Twitter and Facebook and how people use them. Then try doing it without using a single metaphor.
Albrecht Schmidt (2017) suggests a pair of glasses as a good metaphor for thinking about future technologies, helping us think more about how to amplify human cognition.
Just as they are seen as an extension of ourselves that we are not aware of most of the time (except when they steam up!), he asks can we design new technologies that enable users to do things without having to think about how to use them? He contrasts this “amplify” meta- phor with the “tool” metaphor of a pair of binoculars that is used for a specific task—where someone consciously has to hold them up against their eyes while adjusting the lens to bring what they are looking at into focus. Current devices, like mobile phones, are designed more like binoculars, where people have to interact with them explicitly to perform tasks.
BOX 3.4
Why Are Metaphors So Popular?
People frequently use metaphors and analogies (here we use the terms interchangeably) as a source of inspiration for understanding and explaining to others what they are doing, or trying to do, in terms that are familiar to them. They are an integral part of human language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphors are commonly used to explain something that is unfamiliar or hard to grasp by way of comparison with something that is familiar and easy to grasp. For example, they are frequently employed in education, where teachers use them to introduce something new to students by comparing the new material with something they already understand. An example is the comparison of human evolution with a game. We are all familiar with the properties of a game: there are rules, each player has a goal to win (or lose), there are heuristics to deal with situations where there are no rules, there is the propen- sity to cheat when the other players are not looking, and so on. By conjuring up these proper- ties, the analogy helps us begin to understand the more difficult concept of evolution—how it happens, what rules govern it, who cheats, and so on.
It is not surprising, therefore, to see how widely metaphors have been used in interaction design to conceptualize abstract, hard-to-imagine, and difficult-to-articulate computer-based concepts and interactions in more concrete and familiar terms and as graphical visualizations at the interface level. Metaphors and analogies are used in these three main ways:
• As a way of conceptualizing what we are doing (for instance, surfing the web)
• As a conceptual model instantiated at the interface level (for example, the card metaphor)
• As a way of visualizing an operation (such as an icon of a shopping cart into which items are placed that users want to purchase on an online shopping site)