The Role of Metaphors in User Interface Design

Usability Inspection by Metaphors of Human Thinking Compared to Heuristic Evaluation

“…For each metaphor, a few key questions to consider in a usability inspection and an example of its use in design are given. Metaphors in the HCI literature have been used in describing certain styles of interfaces, for example, the desktop metaphor (Johnson et al, 1989), and as a vehicle for representing and developing designs of interfaces (Erickson, 1990;Madsen, 1994;Neale & Carroll, 1997). This article uses the term metaphors differently, in that the metaphors are not in any way intended as interface metaphors, nor are the metaphors imagined to form part of designs.…”

Visualisation improves the usability of voice-operated mobile phone services

“…The use of metaphor allows the human computer interface designer to capitalize on the users previous knowledge of both computing and non-computing domains by allowing them to apply this knowledge to a new computer system or application. To be successful, a metaphor should enable the user to map their existing knowledge to a novel domain, resulting in an understanding of new concepts arising from more established concepts (Carroll and Mack, 1985;Neale and Carroll, 1997). In the present study, two established real-world physical entities (the computer desktop, and the filing cabinet) were used to augment the dialogue of a standard number-based phone service, by using language associated with the respective real-world referents.…”

A single-user tabletop card game system for older persons: General lessons learned from an in-situ study

“…Discussions of this general issue in the HCI literature have lead to a consensus that it is most often unnecessary and inadvisable to stick rigidly to a metaphor (see, e.g., [4]). …”