Interactions - May/June 2009 - Models and Principles Relevant to Design (Page 19)

novice users have difficulty understanding these processes and avoid using the devices that employ them. Listen to Rose describe one of his favorite features of the Kindle: “What would be great about developing an electronic book, a digital book? It would be if you did not have to go through the downloading process, it was all self-contained.” Users rarely express this level of trepidation when moving files from one local directory to another. Even “sending” email, and “ attaching” files, makes more sense to such users, because these expressions more accurately draw from metaphors that suggest horizontal movement. We would never speak of “ uploading” an email to a friend, even though, protocols aside, the process is technically very similar to adding a new page to a Web server.

And yet the problem is replicating itself today as we speak of “cloud” computing in the naive hope that this will mean something to our audiences. Bezos made a casual use of this metaphor in his interview with Charlie Rose: “When you make margin notes or highlight text,” he explains, “that also is stored and saved, and it’s saved on the server side too, it’s saved in the Internet cloud at Amazon so you can never lose those notes and marks.” Rose did exactly what most users do when we speak in such terms: He moved on to the next question, not wanting to reveal ignorance about what a “cloud” computer might be. Of course, he knows what a cloud is, and what a computer is, but he was unable to “run the blend” because

there are very few properties of a cloud that could actually contribute to his understanding of this technology. Indeed, the most salient property of a cloud, its transience, is not something we would want users to associate with our data-stor-age solutions.

The current proliferation of touch interfaces will provide repeated opportunities to think through the challenges of blend theory. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod features of the iPhone at Mac World 2007, he began with the unremarkable claim that we can now “touch our music.” The phrase elicited silence from the audience, as Jobs’s listeners tried to make sense of this expression. They all knew what it meant to hold a CD and page through liner notes, and most of them probably remembered the look and feel of an LP album cover. They all knew what listening to music on an iPod Classic was like, the “touch” of smooth plastic and its revolutionary click wheel. But these two source spaces don’t converge easily into a blend that describes what it is like to tap, flick, and swipe through songs and Cover Flow artwork on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about “touching your music” since then. The figure

of speech doesn’t work, which is to say, it doesn’t help people understand how to operate the new interface.

Metaphors have been problematic in the field of interaction design ever since the Macintosh had us throwing good content into the trash can. Alan Cooper has written that metaphors are bad for interaction design for at

least three reasons: They don’t scale well, they presume shared (antecedent) experiences that might not really exist, and they impede digital projects with the constraints of the physical analogs upon which they are often based [ 6]. His superb advice is to focus instead on idiomatic design: interactions (such as right-click or pointing with a mouse) that don’t come naturally and don’t presume shared experiences, but that are extremely easy to teach and learn. Most “touch” interactions will fall into this category. And the expression “cloud computing” is really an idiom, a “ colloquial” metaphor that makes sense within the context of technical manuals and the community of IT professionals, but not to others, to whom the expression is confusing. Our literary minds are immensely receptive to figurative language. Knowing about conceptual blends can help us think a little more deeply about how users might be interpreting the figurative language we use to explain how our devices work.

[ 6] Cooper, A., R. Reimann, and D. Cronin. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Hoboken, N. J.: Wiley, 2007.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Hannon is associate professor and founding chair of the information technology leadership department at Washington

& Jefferson College in Washington, PA. He teaches courses in human-computer interaction, the history of information technology, data presentation, and project management, among others. He is the author of Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture. More recently, he has published widely on the role of educational technologies in higher education. His current book project is Usable Devices: Mental and Conceptual Models, and the Problem of Contingency.

May + June 2009