The intellectual core of managing the development of software is the editing of metaphor and analogy. If you strip away the business and team management components, the job of defining and iterating on a piece of software for people to use is essentially about creating, selecting and enforcing a bundle of metaphors.
This is because software, by its nature, is abstract. Crash Course’s excellent series on Computer Science even has a little recurring animation they play each time they move up a level of abstraction in the computing stack. The fact that this happens so often as to warrant a special bit shows how core this process of intellectual leaping “up” the chain of metaphors is to computing.
From my perspective, as someone trained in cognitive science and linguistics, Lakoff and Johnson‘s observation about the necessity of metaphors in abstract thinking and communication is exemplified in the way computers and humans interface. In this medium, there is almost no physicality (and as voice agents grow, the physical aspect of computing is further reduced into the purely audial). All understanding must map, though metaphors and mental models, to some experience of the real world.
No where is this more clear than the concept of skeuomorphism. This is the application of the visual look of real objects to their software analogs, on the theory that people will recognize and bring their intuitions from the real world into their new experience. This style fell out of fashion, the reasons for which are a whole other essay about dialectics and technology as fashion. But it is the easiest entry point for those looking to understand the importance of analogies to interfaces.
Another pervasive cognitive metaphor used in software is the “___ is a journey” analogy. A user story is a “journey” for the user. This makes some sense, but like all structuring metaphors it has a lot of implications and entailments that people wielding this metaphor are often not aware of. Users may wander on and off the path. They may never make it to a destination and still be satisfied. Not all who wander are lost.
As new interface paradigms become common, or as your UX designer pushes for some new pattern or another flow change, always watch the metaphors. The more consistent and intuitive the metaphor, the more productive the implications, the better. One thing that sets apart “product people” is not necessarily that they are inventive, but that they can crystallize an emergent abstraction. What does that mean? It means they can see the metaphors and analogies others are unconsciously relying on. They can identify the contradictions and tensions between competing analogies. They can empathize with the cognitive effort understanding a metaphor takes, and feel if it serves users well, or just adds confusion. They can look for commonalities, and take stories, features and technologies into a new level of abstraction.
