The Intentionality of Interface Metaphors

Unpacking assumptions

Published in

Thinking Design

6 min readSep 13, 2018

Software is laden with abstractions and metaphors, and they are super interesting because they give us a glimpse into human perception. When something is easier to understand in an interface, you can begin to pick apart why it is easier to understand. You can ask yourself why something like the idea of a desktop is comprehendible, and see that people are constantly drawing parallels and recognizing patterns.

As a user experience designer, I think it may be helpful to shift and think about why a person reacts and behaves in a certain way and not just the fact that they do.

I’ve written before about interface metaphors, and now it’s time to take things a little further and dive into the world of design metaphors around user accounts.

Perception of an account

Anyone who regularly uses a computer, the internet and/or mobile applications has a sense of what an account is. They have a mental model drawn up of what having an account means, and all of the associations and implications of accounts.

They might subconsciously associate accounts with secure, personal, control, ownership, storage, stability, etc. and implicitly know you can’t really ‘move’ your account and that and there can’t be one user account shared by all users. They also probably know that you can usually ‘delete’ your account and ‘edit’ it too.

Where did these associations and implicit knowledge come from? Are our mental representations of things like bank accounts determining our perceptions of our user accounts?

I attempted to research the etymology of the idea of a ‘user account’ and why it is called that in the first place.

My recent trip to Seattle’s Living Computers: Museum + Labs included a lot of time on the Xerox Alto — the first GUI OS! Even these have a very early nod to user accounts — the user gives the disk an owner name

Details and definitions

The definition of user account today reads, “An established relationship between a user and a computer, network, or information service.”

The “user” term is pretty straight forward because it refers to the person using the software or service, but the more and more using software becomes a norm for all people, the weirder it gets to call what is really just a person a “user.”

“One of the horrible words we use is ‘users.’ I am on a crusade to get rid of the word ‘users.’ I would prefer to call them ‘people.’”— Don Norman

The term ‘account’ is a bit trickier to trace as far as where this idea in software came from. The idea of a ‘contractual relationship’ comes up frequently in definitions, but rather than a relationship with a bank, for example, the person is having a relationship with whatever entity they have an account with.

And a person expects that relationship to uphold their standards of what being in a relationship means: secure, personal, controllable, with a sense of ownership. A lot of time, a person is trusting this entity to store their information rather than their money.

Account-related activities

Within interfaces, a user’s settings and a user’s account are often grouped together or referred to as a ‘profile.’ This idea of control and editability is a recurring theme, but also a person’s account is tied more and more to their identity. It’s no longer simply a nod to the relationship.

With the concept of an account also comes the concept of ‘log in’ or ‘sign in.’ According to Google, log in is the phrasal verb of ‘log’ and means, “go through the procedures to begin use of a computer, database, or system.”

You begin to unpack that abstraction and try to stitch together a story of how logging and signing could eventually lead to how we describe accessing a service. A system is simply keeping a ‘log’ of when a person is accessing that system even if that log is digital. Not to go too deep down the blockchain rabbit hole as a tangent, but with blockchain technology, something simple like this log of a person accessing a system can be distributed across many, many machines so that even if one log is inaccurate, there is an entire ecosystem to be able to do checks and balances with.

In order to log in to a system, a person needs a unique identifier and then some sort of authentication to let the system know that they are in fact that person. This is typically in the form of a username and a password.

A username as a unique, personable identifier makes a lot of sense considering what human beings use names to accomplish. A password is an interesting one, on the other hand, because it is literally the ‘word’/string required to gain passage into the account. This reminds me a bit of old fables and stories of trolls under bridges asking for the answers to riddles in order for passersby to use the bridge.

The Impact of assumptions

All of this matters because, when you design a new system and you want that new system to feature ‘accounts,’ you rely on people making a series of assumptions. For example:

Once you are logged in, actions and info are associated with your specific account.
You can’t edit other people’s accounts; there is a sense of ownership and security of accounts.
Information is personalized to you; not everyone sees the same data and information.
You can’t export your data from your account like you can take money out of a bank.
You don’t own your data alone, the entity you make an account with owns your data as well.
There is not a history accessible by you of any info changes; only the business has access to that history.
You can ‘add’ and ‘delete’ information. You might not fully think about the complexity of what adding and deleting actually requires on the hardware side (think, writing and writing over), but you have a concept of the machine’s memory of data and being able to add to that memory and edit that memory nonetheless.

And these assumptions rely on someone already having a mental model of what an ‘account’ entails. What if someone has never had an account before of any kind?

The digital world is so interesting because we have all of these learned metaphors we constantly build upon that are actually very complex and complicated. Someone that has never been on the internet before/never used a computer or a mobile device might have a tough time grasping even something seemingly simple like an account.

You have to place yourself in a person’s shoes and ask yourself what kinds of constructs they are going to be familiar with because they are a human being and what kinds of constructs that are going to confuse them because they haven’t had the same experiences that you have.

It is also important to remember that even people who have been on the internet before have varying values and beliefs, such as valuing the community over the individual vs. the individual over the community. People in the U.S. have this want and need to be unique and function as an individual, but this is not as important as the overarching community succeeding in other cultures around the world. This affects seemingly simple things like accounts, because although a unique identifier like a name might resonate, it might be disorienting for some because the information is not tied to the greater community.

Final thoughts

One thing that does unite us all is the human ability to understand and create abstractions and representations. The ability to draw parallels, correlations, and patterns between things that may seem completely unrelated from an outside perspective is an incredible shared trait.