Uproot

I love metaphors. As an interaction designer I’m referring to interface metaphors, of course. Metaphors in interaction allow us to easily control processes happening in incredibly complex systems. They allow us to understand that turning a wheel left will steer your car in that direction or that pulling a wire will start or stop your music.

Alice Rawsthorne discusses metaphors in her latest article in the NYTImes.com about the growing disconnect between form and function in user interfaces:

In ye olden days when form did follow function, you could guess roughly how to use an object from its appearance. But our ability to work out how to download and play music on a Shuffle is largely determined by the design quality of the software that operates it — the “user interface” in geek-speak, or “U.I.” If the “U.I.” is well designed, you should be able to use the device so intuitively that you will not have to think about it. But if it is badly designed, the process will seem so confusing that you will probably blame yourself for doing something wrong.

Hawthorne goes on to talk lightly about the future of user interfaces and discusses how design leaders like John Maeda and IDEO are exploring gestural metaphors to create a more natural interface between complex technology and users. I highly recommend this short read.
I won’t pretend I can speak at length to what the recipe for a great interaction metaphor is but I do think of a few that are personal favourites.

1. The Direct-Drive Turntable – My first instrument. The ability to understand how to control and manipulate the sound on a record couldn’t have been easier to understand. Grabbing, releasing, pushing and pulling pauses, plays, fast forwards and rewinds the particular track you’re on, which is determined by where you placed the needle. Simple, fun and still relevant.
2. The Jog Dial – The first mobile phone I owned came with this fascinating control. With it, you could scroll menu options, contacts and messages. To select something you simply pressed the dial inward. That distinctive metaphor became a key contributor the success of Blackberry devices; users loved the natural way of browsing their inbox. Touchscreen-based devices aside, their still isn’t a better mechanism for scrolling content on a mobile device to date.
3. The iPhone – Originally I was going to leave this off the list, not for fear of being accused of stating the obvious but up until recently I wasn’t convinced that the iPhone was a great interface metaphor. If you think about it, the inputs (pinching to zoom, flicking to scroll) didn’t seem to map to any natural movements. However, you can’t deny that a lot of people just get how to control their iPhones, even from the first use. I witnessed this first hand when my business partner’s 2-year old son began scrolling through photos on my iPhone. Here is a kid who’s basic interactions including pushing, pulling, throwing and grabbing, yet he clearly displayed an ability to select a photo album and browse forward and backward through the photos in it. (Going back to the albums list was another thing — he can’t yet comprehend the arrow-shaped button labeled ‘Back’.) I learned my lesson then and there about questioning the industrial design team at Apple.
4. The ‘Back’ Button – I won’t say too much about the most popular control in every web browser, except for this: Is there a button that you interact with more often outside of possibly your remote control on a daily basis? The back button set up a visual model of web sites as a linear stream of pages to which we traverse laterally. Since then rich-interface (Flash, AJAX) designers and developers have had a heck of a time trying to break that model.
5. The Ninentdo Wii Nunchuck and Wand – Another obvious choice. Ninetndo’s attempt to make gaming as realistic as possible shifted focus from the screen to the inputs. Though the likeness of characters in Wii games aren’t anywhere close to realistic, the overall experience is thanks to their intuitive, accelerometer-driven controllers. A lot is being made of Project Natal, Microsoft’s evolution of this metaphor, but I think it’s missing something. Though I can’t put my finger on why, I suspect that when I get to try out this update to the X-Box it will feel a hell of a lot more awkward then performing the same actions with the Wii controllers in my hand.