The Digital Metaphor
Skeumorphism is dead. Long live the Digital Metaphor
The very first time I used one, it happened without me even noticing. It was four or five years ago and I was taking notes during an utterly boring academic lesson. As a premise, you should know that I’m very visual in my notes: arrows, circles, bullet points, little silly drawings fill up my notebooks, and you can usually check the exact point where I stopped listening to the professor and started wandering away in my mind when visual elements take total control over the page and text completely fades away.
So, that time I was still taking textual notes, and suddenly the professor started to talk about something that could be represented as a category, or a group, and then he went on explaining the details of a single element inside this group. Instinctively, I found myself representing the hierarchy concept this way:
This is an imitation, as many will probably understand, of the way folders and files where represented in some older versions of the Windows OS.
So, why is this relevant?
Because for the first time, or at least the first I can remember, I was using a digital metaphor in the real world. If you think about it, this is like skeumorphism the other way round, or digital skeumorphism.
How could that happen? And what does it mean?
It was way before I started dealing with design and technology. But of course, I’ve been using computers since I was a kid. To me, a folder is primarily a virtual one. A file has no existence as a concrete object. A desktop can only be made out of pixels. This is probably due to my mother language not being English, but also because I started to use folders, files and desktops on a computer way before I started to use those in real life. Not to mention something like the rolodex: I’ve never seen a real one in my life. This is exactly why skeumorphism is losing its very reason for being. And this is why the reverse is going to happen, soon.
It was simply natural, to me, to use a visual element I was used to as a metaphor for representing an analogous concept. And it was very efficient.
Now, I think this method can be extended. I’m not saying that we should draw files and folders on paper. But we can use existing digital metaphors for new digital products.
There has been a lot of debating around the war between skeumorphism and flat design, the latter prevailing in the end with the release of iOS7. But this doesn’t mean that metaphors are dead. On the opposite: we have a whole new set of metaphors awaiting to be used, new symbols that entire generations have now fully internalized. Symbols that only live in the digital realm, with no match at all in the physical one.
We used one of them for our product, Mapnaut. It’s not just fully integrated with our product, it’s in our pitch too (as kindly suggested by one of our great mentors, @globalcapjcr):
Mapnaut is an app for bookmarking places as easily as you bookmark websites on a web browser.
The basic idea was to extend the meaning of a web browser from virtual websites to real locations, borrowing two of the main functionalities that come with it: the bookmark and the search bar. Not only: we took advantage of the concept of hashtags from Twitter, and of the timeline as well, slightly adapting its behavior into a new form, which we called spaceline (stay tuned and you’ll hear more about that soon).
As you see, it’s not just about graphics. It’s about the interaction. The expected behavior of an element. The element can be styled in any fashion: it only needs to resemble the original object it’s pointing to as much as the user implicitly understands the metaphor and therefore the interaction pattern. Than, the same response will be expected from it. This happened with physical metaphors before, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t happen with digital ones as well.
Long live the Digital Metaphor.
