Comparing Design Metaphors and User-Driven Metaphors for Interaction Design

TL;DR

This study compares design metaphors with user-generated metaphors across three platforms, revealing mismatches and cultural differences that impact user experience communication.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze and compare design and user metaphors, highlighting their discrepancies and implications for interaction design.

Findings

Design metaphors often do not align with user metaphors.

Metaphor resonance varies across different user groups.

Comparing metaphors can improve user experience evaluation.

Abstract

Metaphors enable designers to communicate their ideal user experience for platforms. Yet, we often do not know if these design metaphors match users' actual experiences. In this work, we compare design and user metaphors across three different platforms: ChatGPT, Twitter, and YouTube. We build on prior methods to elicit 554 user metaphors, as well as ratings on how well each metaphor describes users' experiences. We then identify 21 design metaphors by analyzing each platform's historical web presence since their launch date. We find that design metaphors often do not match the metaphors that users use to describe their experiences. Even when design and user metaphors do match, the metaphors do not always resonate universally. Through these findings, we highlight how comparing design and user metaphors can help to evaluate and refine metaphors for user experience.