Reaching through analogy: a Design Rationale perspective on roles of analogy

A powerful way of reaching through technology is to use analogy to make the technology transparent by exploiting the user’s familiarity with other situations. However, analogy has a number of roles in user interface design in addition to the one of helping the user understand the system. In this paper we consider some of these roles and their relationship to our Design Rationale (DR) framework (MacLean et al., 1989). Our goals are to develop the DR framework by exploring the implications of explicitly taking account of analogy, and to articulate an account of the roles of analogy in design by organizing them around DR concepts.