Metaphors: Realistic vs. Form-based Phone Interfaces

Conclusions

Impact for Practitioners

    Based on this study, we were able to recognize several guidelines for practitioners when designing a telephone interface.  Most importantly, a realistic metaphor doesn't necessarily decrease performance.  Because it is more visually appealing, a realistic interface should be considered in areas like home/office/entertainment where subjective satisfaction is important.  It can also be used in areas such as life-critical systems and industrial applications as long as it doesn't increase the design time or cost.

Suggestions for Future Researchers

    Above all, future studies comparing metaphoric telephone interfaces to form-based interfaces should avoid a within subjects design.  It leads to extremely high standard deviations and obscures data which could potentially be used to develop a learning curve.  If a within subjects design must be used, the sample population should be very large and the interfaces should be sufficiently different that subjects cannot apply knowledge gathered from the first interface to the second.

Refined Theory

    We believed the imperfect metaphor would cause confusion among users.  In this case, the metaphor was adequate enough for users to maintain similar task-completion times.  If we can generalize these results, then the realistic metaphor is apparently not as ineffective as we predicted.  Performance, then, would not change appreciably between realistic designs and form-based designs.

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