by Kate O'Neill
Traffic, Cost, and the Nuance of Metaphor
We have a whole set of metaphors that describe digital experience as travel or motion. We talk about traffic, about the customer’s journey, about mapping that journey, and about the user’s path. We also have the idea of landing, as a landing page on a website—the first page a user visits on the website, and even this concept of visiting a website is a metaphor of place.
When we talk about “traffic” to a website, it sounds like the “traffic” of highways and city streets, but it actually borrows from the retail need to measure “foot traffic” in stores—meaning the number of shoppers in and out the doors of the store in a given day or time period.
But the mechanics of setting foot in a store are both like and unlike viewing an e-commerce website, in ways that are helpful to break down.
Ways in which the concepts are alike:
They are human-centric, or human-experience-centric.
They deal with volume.
They deal with access.
Ways in which the concepts differ:
The experience of a store is linear; a person can’t jump from point to point.
People don’t multitask as easily or as much in physical retail stores as they do when online.
The effort required by a person to visit a physical store is generally much higher than that required to visit a website.
It can be hard to disambiguate these terms and the physical entities they reference from how we think about them in the digital context, but as you step back and take those words at their more common parlance—physical use—you realize how much of the physical world has colored the experience of attributes in the digital space.
And those origins are interesting to delve into, because if you look at a metaphor like traffic and the concept it describes, we know that the most common usage of traffic, in the physical world, is road congestion, and is something to be endured. Of course the web usage owes more to the concept of “foot traffic” in a store, but it’s still helpful to explore what we have meant throughout time when we think about this metaphor, and what lessons might be applicable today for what we do with it.
Also, the concept of traffic online is applied to more than just e-commerce websites; so all websites, even informational websites, spend considerable effort measuring and maximizing their “foot traffic”—which may not be the metaphorical aspect that will benefit them most.
Years ago, I owned a digital strategy and analytics agency, and my clients often wanted to know about how to “increase the traffic” to their websites. They asked this as if they made no distinction in the kind of traffic they got to their site.
I always find that interesting, since in the physical world, when we think about traffic, it’s always a negative.
In fact, even online, traffic is a cost. You’re bringing the people in from somewhere, and you’re paying for them to come. You’re paying for the bandwidth to serve them content.
So yes, that traffic does come at a cost to you.
That’s not to say that traffic is bad, of course. It’s just that recognizing the cost of the traffic can help create a disciplined mindset around marketing.
When you flip the idea that traffic is desirable, and amend that to traffic is expensive, and that we need to be mindful about the makeup and management of that traffic, then we achieve more parity in the metaphor, and it’s potentially informative and useful to us.
Every time we see a metaphor borrowed from one context into another, it’s helpful to remind ourselves about the relationships between these ideas and what subtle connotations they convey. Because there’s too often too much that we lose to the everyday because words become mundane, but they still trigger associations on subconscious levels.
Movement Versus Stillness
I grew up in a small south suburb of Chicago, and my early memories of my family making day trips into the city are filled with fascination at the pulse of movement. The pedestrians filled the sidewalks along Michigan Avenue, the buses and taxis and cop cars and bicyclists and everything bustled, and it all happened with a determination and energy that to me felt far more alive than the suburbs ever did.
In a related way, you can think about relationships of digital and physical metaphors as having different dimensions to them, where some of them relate to movement—such as flow or journey—and others relate to stillness—such as bookmark or save.
metaphors of movement: flow, journey
metaphors of stillness: bookmark, save
Part of the experience, as well, with cities and other places is in your sense of movement through them. And perhaps part of their meaning to you.
Movement Through Space
Although Times Square would certainly be considered by many measures to be a very successful place, the flow of visitors through the space was inhibitive, and locals tended to avoid it. The subtle efforts made by the architectural firm to improve those issues are a classic example of placemaking as well as a vivid illustration of intentionality about movement through place.
Beginning in 2011, the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta undertook a revamp of Times Square to make the space easier to move through. (David Owen wrote a beautiful profile about it in the New Yorker in 2013.37) One of the constraints of the space, as one of the firm’s partners described it, was how in addition to the pulsating energy of the brightly lit and dynamic billboards, the space itself, due to the shape created by Broadway’s diagonal intersections around 45th Street, creates a sense of constriction as people move through it.
On the other side of town, the architects noted that the information kiosk in the center of Grand Central Terminal seemed to break up the immensity of the space and create a fluidity of movement; so they decided to try something similar in Times Square. In addition, they reasoned that if a person is walking toward you, there’s a tension created of who’s going to move, who gives way first; but if your obstacle is not a person but a stationary object, you know who gives way. (Obviously, you do.) As part of their solution they added a series of long granite benches—fixed objects, which also serve as occasional seating. Their addition encourages a more natural movement through the space, and it turns out that it creates less tension too.
So the question this poses as you think about the design of integrated experience is: What is the nature of the experience that you want someone to have in the setting of your website, application, or system? And how does it relate to the sense of place it’s connected to? What sense of momentum or reflection best serves the overall experience of the store, hospital, or museum you’re designing for? Do you want to create a sense of comfort, or is there perhaps some reason to create a sense of energy or even unrest? What will be the appropriate feeling to invoke? Moreover, how can the data model reinforce that? It may need to be able to measure senses of motion or stillness, or whatever dimension is meaningful at any given time to know whether that design intent is effective.
Metaphors of Digital Experience as Printed Matter
At the outset of the World Wide Web, it was perhaps an obvious metaphor to think about web content as printed reading material, which meant at least the following metaphors:
pages
bookmark
The terminology has stuck, even though what happens on “pages” could be video content, an app, or some other highly interactive experience.
But it’s still helpful to think about this metaphor of reading and what reading is about—that is to say, reading is about relaying information in a way that’s linear, and/or archived, and/or easily referenced.
When understood, that metaphor can inform that digital experience; and the data model can support it when that’s relevant. In other words, if there need to be aspects of metadata that have to do with findability and retrievability to enhance this kind of experience, that’s where we might want to go with our ideation.
The Data Layer of the Experience
You have to design for the data layer
of the experience. For example, if you’re creating an experience that builds from the metaphor of reading, it’s helpful to think through the metaphor (without being skeuomorphic) in order to understand the data and metadata you will need to collect to optimize that experience.
If the experience is meant to be metaphorically like a book, you’re optimizing for deep engagement with the written content; so you’ll probably want to know about page turns.
If the experience is meant to be metaphorically like a newspaper, you’re optimizing for currency and authority/influence of content; so you’ll want to know about clipping and sharing.
Thinking through the experience associated with the metaphor can help unearth not only where there are opportunities to take the experience deeper but also what data to collect in order to optimize.
Metaphors of Digital Experience as Architecture or a Building
Whether you’re designing it, analyzing it, or using it, a website’s parallels to a building are very graspable; and the related metaphors can be quite useful in visualizing and dimensionalizing digital space. Even before the World Wide Web, we knew that computers had “windows.” That paradigm of conceptualizing the presentation of information on a screen has persisted for decades in operating systems and software applications. But the web also gave us:
Entrances
Exits
The ideas of architecture have long influenced digital space. Even the term information architecture makes that clear.
So we have these metaphors of digital experience as a building: entrances, exits, and windows. Which makes me start questioning, what are the elements we’re not using?
Going Beyond the Obvious
What are other characteristics of a building? What might they suggest about experience?
You could apply this question to any of the categories of metaphor, but for example, what are the other characteristics of a building that we don’t use in describing digital experiences?
Doors?
Stairs?
Floors?
Roof?
Ceiling?
Could there be anything useful about these ideas?
If we were to think about the concept of, say, “doors” as a digital metaphor, what might that mean? Doors are transitions between one room and the next, so what might that suggest about experience design, and how we facilitate a meaningful experience through doors for users?
If we were to think about “stairs,” is there a connective metaphor between levels, between access points? Is there something there that allows us to flatten out some part of a journey?
In other words, with any of these ideas, can we borrow from our metaphorical thinking about design in order to broaden our minds? What are the available tools we can use to think about design and data in such a way that we can provide these new, different, and meaningful experiences?
Rethinking the Metaphors
What we have is the language of place and the lens of context. We learn from observing the way the language of place has infiltrated digital to think about local coherence and how the idea performs in context.
When we use the words of a place to describe a digital experience, we are infusing that experience with dimension that gives shape to the abstract and expands our ability to conceive of the digital world. But if we use the words sloppily, or choose words or ideas that limit the experience unnecessarily, we may miss out on opportunities to innovate.
Take for example Netflix. You probably know, as most people do, that Netflix was all about renting unlimited DVDs before pivoting into streaming. What you may not know is that before launching that DVD subscription program, they started out as a service to rent DVDs a la carte—just like Blockbuster, except online and through the mail. (I joined the company just as they were retiring the a la carte model.) When they hit upon the idea of a DVD subscription model, they discovered that they had been working with a rapidly-aging notion of how customers wanted to interact with the physical world; and their new model simplified it. Of course their even newer model—streaming video—simplified it even more. What are the wide-open opportunities to rethink the interactions with the customers in your market?
It’s key to remember that the convergence of physical and digital happens around the human experience. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the opportunities to adapt and offer more contextually relevant experiences are evolving all the time.
More and more we’re going to have amplified data, which will allow us to create many rich experiences if we’re mindful of them.
The Language of Relative Place and Movement
We’ve already explored the role sense plays in making meaning. But one of the most overlooked senses in design is the kinesthetic—dealing with the importance of movement through space. That sense of space is in full play with technology when it comes to gesture-based interfaces and other haptics. The accelerometer in our smartphones has an idea of which way we’re moving, how fast, and at what elevation. Right now that data is being used mostly for navigation apps and games, but it will become part of more and more interfaces.
It matters, then, to think about the way we think about movement.
Once we’ve looked at metaphors in that way, as digital experience has borrowed from physical place, there’s also some worthwhile considerations of the language of place, some of which has also started to be used in digital experience. Examining place language could also reveal interesting thought-provoking tools for us as we think about converged digital and physical experiences.
It’s been something of a hobby of mine to collect examples of place in language, and one of the things that interests me most about them is how many convey changing perspective, movement, or relative place.
Look at these words, for example:
parallax: the effect of place and perspective on what’s visible or in focus
deixis: the perspective of place (or time or person) in language (“here” versus “there,” or “this” versus “that”)
itinerant: wandering, especially for work
peripatetic: wandering
and then . . . proximity
There are so many wonderfully rich words about perspective and viewpoint, and you have to examine how they relate to the place, in the sense that you have a different way of looking at things by standing in a different place. They’re all about movement, perspective, and relationship to place.
The first one on the list, parallax, is a term we’ve seen these last few years in front-end web design to describe elements that appear to be moving independently of one another. But in a physical sense, parallax has to do with the effect of place and perspective on what’s visible or in focus. So we’ve already borrowed that into digital usage, but I think there’s even more that it could tell us about the way we experience the world. There’s so much about what is in focus or visible given obstacles in one’s path, given your place in space and time, or what you’re trying to see or understand, that it can describe what is available for you to view or to comprehend. This could be a helpful way to think about complex and overwhelming information; but the idea of parallax could help us consider how to create the right perspective, or a just-enough perspective for people who are using a system.
For example if we have data that determines our rate of movement and can deduce whether we’re driving or walking through a city, and if we know that each mode will have different kinds of obstacles and different kinds of opportunities, then the kinds of things that might be presented to us as options for our next actions—such as promotions or resources—might vary.
Another term on this list that I think is potentially helpful is deixis, which is a linguistic construct that describes the perspective of place in language. A great example is Airbnb’s “Don’t Go There; Live There” campaign (which we will discuss at length in “The Human-Centric Data Model: A Look at Airbnb’s “Don’t Go There; Live There” Campaign”).
These are all potentially rich terms, with many nuances a
bout movement and place that could relate to perspective and experience. Any of these might be good tools to prompt original thought about the design and data models needed for creating a satisfying experience.
Connected Ideas and the Metaphor of Curation
The web is the best interface we’ve had yet for exposing the connective layers of ideas—until something better comes along, perhaps. But for now, we’re still reaping the benefits of living in a time when the links between ideas can be made visual and can be “explored,” to use a physical metaphor.
Curation
The idea of curation is a metaphor borrowed from the art world, of course. Once I saw a world-class curator give a lecture, after the notion of “curated” social media had become a thing, and it nearly moved me to tears to think of the meaning he was adding to the experience of art.
The contemporary usage of the term curation, though, as it relates to digital content and social media, loosens the use of this terminology. Erin Kissane wrote an “epic” five-part series examining the notion of curation, differentiating between the kind of curation that implies filtering or selecting and the kind of curation that implies collection or preservation, but also digging deep into the cultural implications of extending the term.38