My 2 cents on Shawna’s Mall Metaphor

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

The use of design metaphors was one of the first things Web designers explored in the mid-90’s on the early commercial Web sites. A Southwest Airlines site used the airport ticket counter as a design metaphor, for example, and the mall metaphor itself was widely used by early eCommerce developers.

I did it, too. I designed a site for the RI Teacher’s union that used a ruled-paper background, and the homepage navigation was designed to look like stuff that was left on top of a notebook. I even had a coffee ring on there.

In the mid-90’s , most of the first Web designers were coming over from print. As Marshall Mcluhan pointed out, we tend to use a new medium the way we used the old one, so a lot of early Web design was driven by what designers knew from print, including the use of metaphor.

While you can make the argument, as Brian has, that a design metaphor can be used to make people feel comfortable with a user experience by basing it on something they already know, there are good reasons why Southwest and the RI Teachers no longer have metaphor-driven Web site designs.

If you really want to get into this, check out Jacob Nielsen’s book Designing Web Usability (where he dissects the Southwest ticket counter site), but it boils down to this: The Web has essentially become an operating system, and successful Web sites are basically apps that run on it. The reason your users come to your site is to complete a task using your app.

That means that Web design has morphed from print-based design principles to software user interface design principles, and the problem with metaphors in UI design is that they don’t scale well as you add functions to your app to enhance your audience’s ability to complete primary and related tasks.

You end up stretching the metaphor until it breaks, and something that started off  giving you a fresh and interesting way to look at a hierarchy of information becomes a drag on your ability to extend that hierarchy. Already on Shawna’s site, you have to wonder if labeling the mortgage section link the “ATM” is a good idea, because it makes people think, and they hate that when all they want is the mortgage section.

IMO, that is sacrificing usability to further the metaphor, which ostensibly exists to enhance usability in the first place. This paradox of metaphor-based Web design is the reason you don’t see more of it.

I’ll admit, UI-based design has made the Web more boring than it used to be, because as  Web sites  adopt emerging standards, they look more and more alike. This may be visually boring, but the upside is that users have a better idea of where stuff is and how it works from the moment they land on your standards-compliant site.

The notable exception to this trend is MySpace, which is apparently where animated GIFs and wild paisley background patterns went when they were banished from the mainstream, sort of like how lots of the people who followed the Grateful Dead ended up in Boulder after Jerry died.

The difference with MySpace is that the task its users are there to accomplish  is precisely to express their individuality within a collective.  That is not the primary reason most people visit Real Estate sites.

That said, listing search, which is the primary reason most people visit Real Estate sites, has become commoditized, so it takes more and more technological horsepower to differentiate a Real Estate search site, (plug alert) such as our use of Google’s own hardware to make IDX feeds “googleable”.

Which is, of course, why smart brokers and agents like Shawna have adopted blogging, because it enables you to compete on the strength of your content, not just your technology. In that sense, all Real Estate blogging is niche marketing, and if Shawna has decided that her niche is  mall shoppers, then maybe she is on the forefront of a backlash against boring, UI-based Web site design and a return to a more print-design inspired Web landscape, at least on niche blogs like hers.

Shawna will know soon enough if this design is striking a chord with her users if she is tracking site performance. I just checked and I didn’t see a Google Analytics script in her code, so  Shawna — even if you are using some other hit counter —  do yourself a favor and set up Google Analytics. Its free and easy. Then pay close attention to the bounce rate, the repeat visit rate, and the average time on site. These metrics will let you know if your target audience is responding to your metaphor, or not.