Metaphors

Over the past few weeks, Mike Kuniavsky has been posting pre-print draft chapters of his upcoming book, Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. In Chapter three, “Too much metaphor” (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4), Mike argues “metaphors may be most useful during first encounters with a new technology. [...As] the technology becomes familiar, the metaphor may lose its value. Eventually, the metaphor that seemed so helpful may start creating more problems than it solves. [...] Recognizing that metaphors have failed can be humbling, but metaphors, like all tools, need regular maintenance.“


Sony Magic Cap (via Mike Kuniavsky).

Most operating systems today are using a metaphor and a paradigm introduced over 40 years ago. The “desktop” metaphor and “paper” paradigm with folders, files, black text on a white background, etc. have been two of the key enablers for the democratisation of personal computers. First it allowed laypeople to easily operate this technology and make it familiar. Second, it created a bloodline of consumer devices (desktops, laptops, PDAs, mobilephones, smartphones, tablets, etc.) that infiltrated, over the years, every workplace, school, home, and coffee shop.

But as Mike noted, all metaphors eventually fail. Sometime in the late 90s when the Internet, mobile phones, and personal digital content (photos, music tracks, emails, etc.) exploded, the desktop metaphor failed. It failed to serve its most basic purpose by making the operation and manipulation of new devices, new content, and new usages unnatural. With the myriad of devices now forming our connected environment, the evolution of “computer/mobile phone” literacy and usages around the world, and the maturity of the discipline of interaction design, the last obsolete bits of this metaphor and paradigm should be relinquished.


People First UI © Nokia, 2007.

During the Homegrown project, we attempted to do just that with People First UI, which replaced the desktop metaphor and other levels of abstraction with a singular vertical list of content settling over time into a personal history of events. Designed for those of us who face literacy challenges, the user interface has a limited and precise interaction vocabulary (6 nouns and roughly 20 verbs) that reflects how people think and speak. The nouns (or content) – people, messages, photos, places, calculations, and alarms, are connected by verbs – make, call, write, and share. Content comes first, abstract hierarchical menus and applications are substituted with a simpler and universally understood question: what can I do with this? I know this is terribly obvious and not terribly new and yet, so important.

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