Use Metaphor To Improve Your Website Design

There's an interesting technique to use when designing web sites that many people don't really think about

. I read an article once that pointed out the usefulness of utilizing objects in the real world to represent either a whole web site or design elements in the site. This representation will work to help the user more quickly understand how to use the site, or to more quickly understand how the site (or portions of the site) is (are) supposed to function.

What a wonderful idea: design a site, or portions of a site, around objects your users will already understand. In writing this technique is analogous to using metaphors. So when users get to your site they will automatically be trained in how to use your site simply because they understand the object your site is designed to emulate.

You might already be familiar with this type of approach to interfaces. For example, the bottom-most layer on a Windows interface is called the desktop, a metaphor meaning that this bottom-most layer is like the literal top of an office desk: you can place things like files and folders on it, you can rearrange or you can order those items upon it.

These metaphors, these representations of familiar real-world objects, help us understand ideas or concepts we are unfamiliar with by associating the unfamiliar with a familiar that is somehow similar.

In web design, look for complicated areas in your site that users may not easily be able to utilize. For these areas, utilize something familiar to the user to help ground them in the familiar. A simple example is the from the website for the movie, "V for Vendetta." Actually, the example I'm thinking of is from the "soundtracK" in the website. The site uses the simple image of a "Wurlitzer" jukebox to provide a metaphor for the music player.

The designers could have just as easily listed the songs without this metaphor, but instead chose the jukebox to represent the representative action of selecting the songs from the list. It also allowed them to use an element from the movie.

Another example, and one that utilizes a whole site, is the Mark Twain Scrapbook, created by PBS for their documentary on Mark Twain (available by searching the PBS website).

As the name of the site implies, they use the metaphor of the scrapbook to create an entire site dedicated to Mark Twain's life. As you flip the pages in the scrapbook, you view images from Twain's life, hear recordings, read letters and quotes, and look at postcards. In other words, the site is a virtual scrapbook.

Again, the designers could have simply created a series of pages and stuck text, sound files and a bunch of pictures on them, but then the site is just that: a bunch of pages with a static display. Through the metaphor of the scrapbook, the site becomes something different. So look for such metaphors in site design. Look how others may use these metaphors in their designs. They not only add to the design of the site, but the add to the usability of it as well.

by: Clinton Lanier

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