Metaphors of Human Thinking: A New Tool in User Interface Design and Evaluation

Understanding human thinking is crucial in the design and evaluation of human-computer interaction. Inspired by introspective psychology, we present five metaphors of human thinking. The aim of the metaphors is to help designers consider important traits of human thinking. We illustrate how to use the metaphors for usability evaluation and how good and poor user interfaces can be appreciated in terms of the metaphors. An experiment with 87 subjects show that usability evaluation by metaphors of human thinking compared to heuristic evaluation uncovers usability problems that are assessed as more severe on users and more complex to repair.