Comparing Design Metaphors and User-Driven Metaphors for Interaction Design
For interaction designers, this work highlights the gap between intended and experienced metaphors, offering a method to evaluate and refine design metaphors.
The study compares design metaphors (from platform history) with user metaphors (elicited from 554 ratings) for ChatGPT, Twitter, and YouTube, finding that design metaphors often do not match user metaphors and even when they do, they may not resonate universally.
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.