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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 semiotic 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.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
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, the Web, 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 mobile and/or 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.
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 design of the user interface is an important part of the design process to produce technologically sophisticated computer-based products for domestic as well as international consumer and business markets.
No matter what the technology, to achieve improvements in the user's performance and 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:
Sets of functions are the verbs of visual-verbal communication. Typical examples of action concepts and their embodiment include these:
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 user interfaces for productivity tools, multimedia, and the Web must carefully plan, analyze, design, and implement user interface metaphors. Good metaphors 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.
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 communities, and how effective visual communication benefits usability and productivity. Illustrated 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 analyses of the Apple's Macintosh desktop metaphor, General Magic's Magic Cap urban metaphor, and metaphorical confusion in examples of multimedia consumer CD-ROM titles and in the Web will illustrate how to analyze and design metaphors based on logical paradigms, task analysis, and cultural stereotypes. 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.
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Copyright 1997
Aaron Marcus, President
Aaron Marcus and Associates
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