Saturday, June 05, 2004
A Bad Metaphor
I'm checking my webmail, and when I look at an individual message, there are links at the top that help me navigate between messages without having to go back to my Inbox. They say "First | Previous | Next | Last".
I study metaphor for a living, so this is interesting. Suppose I am reading a given message, and I want to figure out where the "Previous" link will take me. I have to map temporal concepts to spatial ones. Does the word "Previous" map to the next-older message or the next-newer message? We map time to space all the time, and "backward" always maps to the past, while "forward" always maps to the future. Also, in gestures, "left" means "past" and "right" means "future" (at least, for English folks. It probably has something to do with reading left-to-right). For instance, when we talk about a sequence of events and we gesture with our hands, we describe the first event with our hands to the left, and our hands work progressively rightwards as the narrative moves forward through time. On graphs that map things over time, t = 0 is the left-hand edge. To work from right to left would seem fundamentally odd. Similarly, if the "Back" and "Forward" buttons on your browser switched sides, so that "Back" was pointing right, that would be wierd. Would it be wierd just because we're used to those buttons pointing one way? I don't think so. For instance, if the "Stop" and "Reload" buttons were to the left of the "Back" and "Forward" buttons, it wouldn't seem nearly as wierd. Switching "Back" and "Forward" would seem jarring on a deeper level, like it goes against the very concepts of "back" and "forward".
The webmail programs I've seen have it all wrong, and I don't see how it happened. I click on "Next", which is on the right. Both the word "Next" and the position of the word indicate they should move me forward to the next-newer message, but the links flout both those clues and take me to the next-older message! Who decided it should be that way? This is the equivalent of the "Forward" button on your browser taking you backwards!
More to the point, though, is that the metaphor is confusing in this context. The labels ought to read "Newest | Newer | Older | Oldest", or at least use "Back" and "Forward" like in web browsers, and have them point to the right thing.
I study metaphor for a living, so this is interesting. Suppose I am reading a given message, and I want to figure out where the "Previous" link will take me. I have to map temporal concepts to spatial ones. Does the word "Previous" map to the next-older message or the next-newer message? We map time to space all the time, and "backward" always maps to the past, while "forward" always maps to the future. Also, in gestures, "left" means "past" and "right" means "future" (at least, for English folks. It probably has something to do with reading left-to-right). For instance, when we talk about a sequence of events and we gesture with our hands, we describe the first event with our hands to the left, and our hands work progressively rightwards as the narrative moves forward through time. On graphs that map things over time, t = 0 is the left-hand edge. To work from right to left would seem fundamentally odd. Similarly, if the "Back" and "Forward" buttons on your browser switched sides, so that "Back" was pointing right, that would be wierd. Would it be wierd just because we're used to those buttons pointing one way? I don't think so. For instance, if the "Stop" and "Reload" buttons were to the left of the "Back" and "Forward" buttons, it wouldn't seem nearly as wierd. Switching "Back" and "Forward" would seem jarring on a deeper level, like it goes against the very concepts of "back" and "forward".
The webmail programs I've seen have it all wrong, and I don't see how it happened. I click on "Next", which is on the right. Both the word "Next" and the position of the word indicate they should move me forward to the next-newer message, but the links flout both those clues and take me to the next-older message! Who decided it should be that way? This is the equivalent of the "Forward" button on your browser taking you backwards!
More to the point, though, is that the metaphor is confusing in this context. The labels ought to read "Newest | Newer | Older | Oldest", or at least use "Back" and "Forward" like in web browsers, and have them point to the right thing.
