Pixels and Place

by Kate O'Neill

  Metaphors: Experiencing One Thing in Terms of Another

  Neuroscience has learned that we make meaning through activating parts of our brains associated with the idea we’re processing. For example, when you read the phrase “Sam ate a delicious steak,” it’s not only the areas of your brain that deal with semantics and syntax that get involved. The area of your brain associated with taste gets involved, too.

  That may seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s an important point. It shows that on some level, we really do experience the meaning we interpret. And when we hear metaphors, we aren’t just taking a figurative picture for granted; we’re actually using the parts of our brains associated with the figurative idea to process the meaning.

  Metaphors, then, constitute an incredibly important part of experience design.

  Legacy Metaphors

  When was the last time you dialed your phone? No, really: When did you last dial any phone? The term dial came to us from the rotary phone interface, which was largely phased out by push-button phones in the 1970s and ’80s. If you’re under forty, chances are you’ve never even seen a rotary phone in person, much less dialed one. Yet the word lives on.

  Even once we began using push-button phones, no one ever really talked about “pushing” phone numbers. Now perhaps we might say we “tap” them but nobody says that; we still “dial.”

  For that matter, your smartphone isn’t much of a “phone”; at least, it isn’t primarily a phone for most of us, who use it more for email and texting and things other than making and receiving calls. Yet the “phone” nomenclature lives on.

  If you truly took inventory of all of the interaction metaphors you encounter on a daily basis, you’d probably be surprised by how many of them—either the interaction itself or the words we use to describe it—are based on outdated technology.

  For instance, you’ve probably seen an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk used as an icon to mean “Save” far more recently than you’ve seen an actual 3.5-inch floppy disk. After all, that’s how we used to save our work in progress . . . twenty years ago. But then, what would be a more contemporary metaphor? A fluffy cloud (another beleaguered metaphor)? Would the image of a cloud adequately convey that the implied action is “save”? Would that association be reassuring, or would it cause people to hesitate and wonder how safe their data is out in some fluffy cloud? And of course, the cloud is itself a metaphor that represents—wait for it—a series of connected disks.

  Perhaps these legacy metaphors give us a comforting feeling of being anchored in a stable experience, even as the devices themselves evolve. Perhaps we crave the familiarity of the old even as we constantly update to the new. Or perhaps we just don’t give it that much thought.

  Metaphors in Marketing

  But even more tangible than these deep metaphors in our surroundings are the analogies we often use in marketing that convey associations we may or may not be intending.

  For example, let’s say you operate a computer repair business. In order to explain to people what you do, you could compare it to being a mechanic or being a brain surgeon. Not to knock mechanics, but certainly the latter analogy makes the work look more specialized and expert, while the former analogy is perhaps more approachable and friendly. The analogy you choose to use depends on what characteristics you want to connect to the work you do.

  Whatever the case, our businesses demand that we be more thoughtful with those brand associations. It’s not enough to rely on the easiest or most familiar metaphor if that’s not the one that carries the meaning you want your business to have.

  Even the way you organize products and information within your business, and the taxonomies you use throughout your business are a kind of metaphor. They describe the framework of your brand’s worldview, as the linguist George Lakoff so vividly demonstrated with the title of his 1987 book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.33 Subtle cues, such as the placement of items relative to one other, can signal meaningful differences. If you’re stocking a craft supply store targeting hobbyists, you might choose to organize paintbrushes with paints to make selection easy and accessible for people just starting out. If you’re stocking an art supply store aimed at professionals, on the other hand, you may want to organize paintbrushes with other tools and paints with other pigments to convey depth and breadth of selection and an appreciation of the importance of the right tools. These may seem like trivial nuances, but nuances convey our biases. Our biases make up our brands, and good brands are opinionated.

  The way you organize content on your website, merchandise in your store, and all your interactions says more about you to customers than you may realize. This is why all of this matters: because meaning is about connection and relevance. The metaphors you use in your marketing say just as much as the words that make up your copy, if not more. It’s worth taking the time to review your marketing and your overall customer experience to make sure what you are saying is what you really mean to say.

  ***

  In order to have that rich conversation, though, in order to dig deep into what we mean when we think about the richness of the opportunities of the integration layers, I think it’s really important to think about the ways that we perceive and experience the physical world and the digital world, in a sense. What are the models, the frameworks that we use mentally to really experience those things so that we can try to bring them more in line and more together. I think it’s important to go to the study of metaphor. It’s really about meaning, and where there’s meaning in the experiences of things, in the data we use to describe those things.

  A lot of my work over time has been about meaning, even when it has been in web technology, content management, digital strategy, and marketing. My educational background was in languages and linguistics, so it comes naturally to me to have meaning be along for the ride in how we communicate and how we think about the underpinnings of what we are conveying to one another.

  So metaphors are a really handy kind of reveal for what we’re actually saying about something at a different layer, a more subconscious layer, what;s happening below the surface when we talk about a thing.

  There are metaphors we have used to describe physical space and digital space and some of those overlap so I think it’s really important to examine that.

  In doing this, I look back to another book by George Lakoff (and Mark Johnson) called “Metaphors we Live By.” There’s a quote that I think really summarizes why metaphor is a relevant tool for this type of work:

  The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

  — George Lakoff34 (emphasis mine)

  So it’s not just about describing one thing as another thing, and it’s not just about using analogies in language, or about the poetic use of language; it’s more that it actually is experienced that way. It isn’t coincidence there are terms that describe online concepts in the language of offline constructs, but that those offline constructs have actually informed our understanding of the online concepts. The thing you are describing in terms of another thing is now experienced as if it is that other thing at some level in your mind and in the minds of those with whom you communicate.

  The Metaphors of How We Experience Digital as Place

  It’s unsurprising, then, that we have a series of metaphors to describe digital concepts in terms of place. It is important to understand how we conceive of the experiences we intend for human beings to have in digital spaces, and how many of them already borrow from metaphors of physical place.

  Data as metaphor, metaphor as experience

  When you decide that you want to track the entry into a website, an “add to cart,” a checkout, and the exit, you have defined a shape to that experience; and that shape is preset by the company’s preferences and what, to the company, determines success. But the customer has a happy path, too, and it may look different. Perhaps the shape of that path would be to enter on meaningful content, which hel
ps the customer identify their next step; to consume enough content to feel empowered, but not too much to feel annoyed; and to complete the transaction with ease. There are qualifiers to each of those steps that have to do with qualitative experiences, and they’re more subjective than readily available metrics (including visits, purchases, and conversion rates).

  If we stop and review the ideal metaphor from the customer—or better yet, from the human—point of view, the experience might look different. For the human on the other side of the interaction, the appropriate shopping metaphor might be conquest. It might be discovery. It might be satisfaction, or comfort, or any number of other constructs that could dramatically affect the way they view the experience. Their perspective could mean that the way you view the experience and the way they view the experience is misaligned.

  Strive to be human when interacting with humans.

  In any given situation, it may be helpful to ask yourself, “What would a human-to-human interaction look like?” How would you (or the appropriate person) conduct your end of the interaction?

  We Can Start With This Metaphor About Place:

  @ Is a metaphor of place

  We have a metaphor that we use all the time probably without thinking about it as place, but the @ symbol tells us where someone is, what entity someone is associated with, that has some kind of takeaway for thinking about the nodes and structures of digital life. This is part of an address, which is itself a metaphor of place. This is how we find someone.

  Metaphors and Metadata

  There’s an interesting link between metaphors and metadata. You need the metaphor to determine what metadata is relevant. You need the metadata to describe the experience of the metaphor.

  Take for example, music streaming. The literal process is just a file stored on a server being accessed by a client and decoded through software that interprets the encoding as audio. But in order to make that experience meaningful, the packaging of that process is described in terms that are skeuomorphic: They refer back to the older experience of listening to music on a hi-fi record player, through the radio, or recorded on a CD. The visual icon that stands in for a song often depicts a vinyl record or a CD. But even beyond the iconography, when we think about “skipping” a track or “fast-forwarding” through it, we’re invoking the experiences of bygone music listening technology because we’re familiar with it. We still have “albums” in music, even though most listeners are not listening by the album. (Artists are, however, making more money from vinyl sales than from streaming.35 But that’s a discussion for another book.) Spotify and other services have “radio” features that play content related in some way to a starter seed, like a song or an artist.

  Since we need these metaphors for people to understand the experience of music streaming, we also need to model the metadata around the metaphors. There are “albums” in digital music, which serve only as bundles of creative work. To optimize the services, we’ll want insights about how many people skipped a track.

  Because digital music playback and even streaming music have now been around long enough to breed listener/user familiarity, the playback interfaces have started to break away from the skeuomorphs and use broader metaphors of music and of file interaction.

  ***

  When you think about data models, there are always relationships between the different entities in the model. The relationship between the entities describes how they interact, but it also hints at underlying assumptions and metaphor:

  Employees work in a department

  Teachers teach students

  A car is a type of vehicle

  There’s often also metaphor embedded in the nature of the relationship, and that metaphor influences the shape of the data collection.

  For example, a song is part of . . . an album? A playlist? A radio station? A collection? A catalog? A library? I could keep going. There are many ways to think about one entity in its relationship to others, and the way we describe it is likely to affect our thinking about the shape and dimensions and limitations of it. The data point or entity exists not just on its own, but as it is experienced in context. So it’s important that we’re mindful of the context we’re creating, the meaning we’re shaping, with the metaphors we accept and design into our products, our messaging, and our strategies.

  The Evolution of Place Metaphors Online

  It’s important for the purposes of this discussion to remember that in the early days of the World Wide Web, the idea of the home page generally referred to our own individual pages that we created and maintained to express our identity and preferences. It generally included a list of links we thought important, and the functional intent was to serve as our own customized jumping-off point into the rest of the web.

  But as time went on, three things happened in parallel: The web became more commercial, so more and more companies developed web pages and sites; browsers started offering a feature whereby the user could set their “home” page to any page; and the web grew in popularity among non-techie people, so more and more people got online who didn’t necessarily have the skills or resources to create a home page of their own.

  Return to “Home Page”

  So by 2016, a semantic shift has fully taken place where the idea of the “home page” is largely understood to mean the conceptual root page of a website that anchors the brand and directs traffic to categories and topical areas within the content of the site. It’s the place where a company like Apple asserts its Apple-ness before sending users off down trails specific to Macs or iPhones or customer support. If you view the web through the lens of one of these big brand presences, then “home page” is not so functionally far-off from the original notion.

  But for individuals, it’s a vastly different experience. Most web users do not have a personal website, and thus do not have that original meaning of “home page.”

  Why is this important?

  Well, when we think about the notion of home, we will see that within that idea there is the idea of controlling your space and having the ability to control your experiences. Home to many people means the place where they are most in charge of creating their own experiences. That has a lovely symmetry with the initial idea of the personal home page, but in the current state of web usage, the idea of home has no widespread parallel.

  We need to understand the way people perceive their journeys online. And in order to understand that, we need to understand the way they perceive their starting points.

  If there is no home, there is no anchor, nowhere to wander away from and to return to; so our wanderings become constant, we have no sense of continuity, and we may lack identity relative to what we experience.

  Home is also at once a human idea and an animal need. In a Maslow-esque hierarchy of needs, home is both fundamental and aspirational. We need a basic version of home to survive, but we also constantly seek its ideal. Home is sacred to us; if it is robbed, we feel violated.

  Somewhat similarly, we feel violated if our digital identity or information is compromised. Our digital spaces have qualities of home about them, too. In parallel ways to how our digital selves are our aspirational selves, as discussed in the earlier section “Our Digital Selves,” it may be that our digital spaces are our aspirational homes.

  Why do our digital metaphors convey place? What is the purpose or benefit?

  We can all relate to spatial experiences. We have “windows,” entrances, exits, “pages,” of which there are “landing” pages, “home” pages, and then “traffic,” which we “drive” to the “sites” we have “built.”

  With 3-D printing and wearable tech, the lines between online and offline experiences are starting to blur and will only continue to do so. And as that happens, we’re going to need a cleaner and more intentional understanding of what place does for us in experiences, and how we can be intentional about creating it.

  Digital landscapes have been thought of in a physical context since Richard Saul Wurman co
ined the term “information architects” in 1975. It seemed natural to link the idea of architecture and the idea of information organization—and that was nearly twenty years before the World Wide Web existed.

  Now, in 2016, Rem Koolhaas has made the same observation, but with the explicit recognition of metaphor:

  Architecture and the language of architecture—platform, blueprint, structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley. They took over our metaphors, and it made me think that regardless of our speed, which is too slow for Silicon Valley, we can perhaps think of the modern world maybe not always in the form of buildings but in the form of knowledge or organization and structure and society that we can offer and provide.36

  What’s stopping us from using other metaphors online? Shoes, walking, running, doors, shelves, books? It may seem like a silly thought, but expanding our thinking about the metaphors we use can open new possibilities for innovative experiences.