Examples of using Metaphors
The examples below illustrate possibilities and dangers of using
visual or interaction metaphors and of imitating existing interfaces:
- icons:
Graphical (pictoral) icons have an intuitive meaning for users,
but they depend on culture or geographic region.
A typical example is the use of US mailboxes with flags:
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there is mail
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/
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there is no mail
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- sliders:
Mechanical "sliders" have fixed end-points, and are almost never coupled
to other controls.
The Windows'95 display control panel breaks this metaphor:
Changing the number of colors may affect the setting of the display
resolution slider.
There are more problems with the Windows'95 control panel, regarding the
use of metaphors:
- The user-interface for display settings is not identical on all
Windows'95 systems. The resolution slider may have a different appearance
and position in the window.
- On some Dell systems (and maybe others) the end-point of the
resolution slider changes when the number of colors is changed.
This breaks another aspect of the slider metaphor: that the end-points can
never change.