Allen Design News
Metaphor in Web Design
Metaphor is a way to understand an unfamiliar concept by using a familiar one. In web design, we work with concepts and technologies that are new to many people. It is important that everyone involved in the web design process (client, manager, developer) has a common understanding of what's being done and how things work. Metaphor is excellent for this.
I'll give an example. Perhaps you want to build a system to manage customer service e-mails based on priority. Instead of giving the technical solution (an array of complex sorting and storage algorithms) I could simply describe a hospital:
"A patient enters the hospital and sees a receptionist. Depending on the patient's needs, they are sent to either the emergency room or to a waiting area. From the waiting area, they can be admitted into intensive care or be seen in a clinic..."
This is more than using a story to understand a problem. It is a working solution that the development team can easily model; "Create a 'receptionist' function to sort and prioritize." You, the Client, might adopt the metaphor by assigning your best service reps to the "ER" for high-priority requests.
The metaphor could be anything:
- Bees gathering pollen could represent distributed computing systems.
- A dog fetching a stick may illustrate a data-retrieval operation.
- A line of lunch ladies serving food is a good image for sequential object assembly.
Metaphor gives everyone a shared concept of what's happening and how it functions. We use metaphor to explain complex systems, to better understand problems and to model possible solutions.