Abstract
User interface design requires designing metaphors, the essential
terms, concepts, and images representing data, functions, tasks, roles,
organizations, and people. Advanced user interfaces require consideration of
new metaphors and repurposing of older ones. Awareness of semiotics principles,
in particular the use of metaphors, can assist researchers and developers in
achieving more efficient, effective ways to communicate to more diverse user
communities.
Keywords:
Consumers, culture, diversity, graphic design, icons,
information design, metaphors, multimedia, rhetoric, semantics, semiotics,
symbols, user interfaces, visible language
Introduction
The use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the incorporation of multimedia,
and the combination of computation with communication functions, e.g., fax,
telephone, television, pagers, and CD-audio are enabling computer-based
communication to occur in a wider array of environments beyond the office.
Consequently, the essential concepts, terms, and images of computers are being
enlarged to include not only those associated with the business-office,
productivity-oriented, desktop work-device for clerical, managerial, or
engineering staff, but also for hand-held consumer communication devices used
in leisure-time as well as work-time activities.
There is a resultant need for effective user interface design to communicate
clearly the content being portrayed for an ever more diverse range of viewers
or users of computer-based displays.
METAPHOR DESIGN
The user interface embodies the data and functions of computer-based products
and provides a basis for the product's usability and commercial success. One of
the important challenges to user interface design is how to help the novice
user become quickly proficient and
eventually become an expert user without the
encumbrance of the training aids that were useful for the novice. Systematic,
information-oriented visual communication, or the graphic design of the user
interface, is an important part of technologically sophisticated computer-based
products as they spread internationally to consumer and business markets.
No matter what the technology, to achieve improvements in their performance an d
pleasure, future user interfaces designs must optimize the following components
to meet users needs and preferences: mental models, navigation, presentation,
interaction, and metaphors.
Metaphors are the fundamental concepts, terms, and images by which and through
which information is easily recognized, understood, and remembered. Metaphors
include the essential means by which choices for command/control are
communicated and the status of all data and functions is depicted. Because
electronic displays can be transformed relatively easily and quickly, these
metaphorical techniques can vary widely across systems and change over time.
Metaphors may achieve their effectiveness through associations of organization
(structures, classes, objects, attributes, i.e., nouns) or operation
(processes, algorithms, recipes, i.e., verbs).
Collections of data or objects are the nouns of visual-verbal communication.
Typical examples of metaphorical contexts and associated familiar physical
objects used to communicate the computer, applications, documents, and data
include these:
- Desk: Drawers, files, folders, papers, paper clips, stick-on note sheets
- Document: Books, chapters, bookmarks, figures; newspapers, sections;
magazines, articles; newsletters forms
- Photography: Albums, photos, photo brackets/holders
- Television: Programs, channels, networks, commercials, viewer
guide
- Compact disk, cassette, record, tracks, jukeboxes
- Deck of cards: Cards, piles
- Games, game rules, game pieces, game boards
- Film: Rolls, slide trays, shows, reels, movies, theaters
- Containers: Shelves, boxes, compartments
- Tree: Roots, trunk, branches, leaves
- Network, diagram, map: nodes, links, landmarks, regions, labels, base
(background), legend
- Cities: Regions, landmarks, pathways, buildings, rooms, windows, desks
Sets of functions are the verbs of visual-verbal communication. Typical
examples of action concepts and their embodiment include these:
- Move (purposeful traversal): navigate, drive, fly
- Browse (low goal-oriented review of options): Rapid replacement,
scanning text lines, window shopping, thumbing through books,
- Scan (very rapid browsing): fast review of scrollable items, fast review of
buildings, objects, people, billboards on highway at high speed
- Locate: point, touch, encircle item(s)
- Select: touch item, poke item, grab item, lasso item, place finger on
item and slide
- Create: add (new), copy
- Delete: throw away, destroy, lose, recycle, shred. Delete (temporary
or permanent) sometimes consists of dragging a file icon to a trash can,
garbage can, refuse truck, black hole, or a goat.
- Evaluate: Rotate knob, slide pointer, twist, spin
- Pour, flow: water (pipelines, rivers), electricity.
The desktop metaphor popularized by Xerox, then Apple contains office
references (desk top, documents, folders) mixed with building references
(windows, trash cans). New metaphorical references and enrichments of the
existing references are occurring all of the time.
Future research needs to explore further culturally diverse metaphors, their
impact on communication, means of evaluating their effectiveness, and the
process of designing them. To achieve successful communication simple, clear,
consistent solutions will continue to benefit increasingly diverse information
products for increasingly diverse international users.
To achieve product success, developers of advanced user interfaces fo r
sophisticated applications must carefully plan, analyze, design, and implement
user interface metaphors. Good metaphors in user interfaces enable users to
comprehend, use, and remember information more quickly, with greater ease, and
with deeper satisfaction by effectively managing the user's expectation,
surprise, comprehension, and delight.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
In this tutorial, researchers, software developers, graphic designers, human
factors specialists, cognitive scientists, and users will learn what metaphors
are, what metaphors have been/will be used to convey system/application
structures and processes, how metaphorical mappings between one world and
another can be explored and shaped for target user communi-ties, and how
effective visual communication benefits usability and productivity. Ilustrated
lectures and video examples will introduce terminology, principles, and
guidelines to think out and develop new metaphors for current and future
products that make them more intelligible, functional, aesthetic, and
marketable.
Case studies, such as analyses of the Apple's Macintosh desktop metaphor ,
General Magic's Magic Cap urban metaphor, and metaphorical confusion in
exemplary multimedia consumer CD-ROM titles, will illustrate how to analyze and
design metaphors based on logical paradigms, task analysis, and cultural
stereotypes. Simple pen-and-paper design projects will give participants
experience in applying principles that are relevant for existing user
interfaces as well as possible future paradigms.
Acknowledgments
This summary is based on "Managing Metaphors for Advanced User
Interfaces cited in the References.
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