Pattern 56: Natural metaphors
AKA:

You are concerned with AESTHETICS (16) and want to make the site more usable. You can exploit transfer effects to help with this. You understand PRIMING AND INTERFERENCE (18).

What will increase the user’s sense of familiarity and understanding of your site’s function and features?

Therefore

Use metaphors that are natural to your target audience. Be consistent in your use of metaphor and don’t go over the top. Consider whether the metaphor may be offensive to some users.

Use THE RHETORIC OF ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE (20) to reinforce metaphor used for navigation. If your site uses the button metaphor, ensure there are no BROKEN BUTTONS (59).

Metaphor and simile are powerful devices in literature and art. They work on computers too. Perhaps the most famous metaphor is that of a desktop wherein documents are represented by icons on a plane window. The advantage of such devices is that users bring their experience with real desktops to bear on their use of the system. They know about filing documents, which helps them understand the idea of saving computer files. They know about waste paper bins so that deleting a file can be accomplished by dragging it to the bin. Even this metaphor has limitations. Who keeps their waste paper bin on top of their desk? But it still works. The Apple idea of switching the machine off by dragging the system icon to the bin is an example of what goes wrong when you mix metaphors and try to extend the metaphor to a place where it doesn’t work.

Authors are always told not to mix metaphors. Shakespeare got away with it, but are you a Shakespeare? Don’t take it too far. The phrase ‘the man is a lion’ usually doesn’t mean that he chases and eats zebra. Some metaphors can offend. One that offends us is the use of the words ‘Colts’ and ‘Fillies’ to designate toilets in some pubs. It’s not so much that it’s slightly sexist but more that it’s utterly twee.

Commercial web site routinely use a metaphor based on the store guides that one sees next to the escalators in big department stores. The navigation bar will contain phrases like ‘china and glass’ that shoppers are familiar with. One can envisage a restaurant metaphor being useful on some sites. Imagine a bookshop site with classifications like ‘appetisers’, ‘main courses’, ‘wine list’ and ‘puddings’. How would users interpret these categories? A possible interpretation might be that appetisers are light, newsy articles, main courses are thick novels, items on the wine list are intoxicating and perhaps erotic (or could they just be classic works) and puddings might be suitable for bedtime reading or just stodgy works about web usability. The point here is that you need to know how your metaphor will be taken. GET-IT? (8) tests Are a possible way of finding out.

The whole concept of navigation is of course itself a metaphor. A common way in which this metaphor is violated is the use of a hierarchical list for the SITE MAP (12). We think that a graph is almost always better; it’s more like a navigator’s chart. The idea of buttons that can be pushed is an almost universal metaphor on the web. Consistency suggests that they should look more like buttons that most of them do.

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