1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Design your web resource 195
Metaphor is when you use an object or scenario that people are
familiar with as a vessel for your site construction and a vehicle for
navigation. Car dashboards, TV remote controls, houses and the
human body have all been used as metaphors.
Metaphors can put your content together in a way that your
user can instantly relate to, but as David Siegel explains (1997),
they must be well designed:
Metaphors are vehicles of exploration. Make it simple,
consistent and easy to get around. A good metaphor puts the
light switch where you expect to find it. A bad metaphor
makes you learn a whole new set of commands to enter. Wellexecuted
metaphors make it difficult to get lost.
Metaphors must be not only well designed, but also well conceived.
The problem with metaphors is they are usually applied literally. A
site for a car parts company is going to use a metaphor linked to the
automobile, not the human body or an art gallery. However, the use
of metaphor and the kind of metaphor should be driven by the
range of content and the structure of the site, not just some literal
association with the subject-matter. Users will relate to the
metaphor in the same way they would relate to its real-life
equivalent. That is its whole purpose. An exploratory metaphor
(human body, gallery, etc.) may actually suit the content of the car
parts site better than the static metaphor of the car dashboard. But,
of course, this would also be unsuitable as its literal association
would seem out of place. Who gives to an art gallery to buy a car
part? It’s difficult to get the right combination of suitable literal
association and appropriate framework for content and navigation.
Metaphors – handle with care.
So let’s get back to our essentials. The ‘linkable summary of
where else on the site they can go’ will point users to various
utilities such as ‘Help’ or ‘Checkout’ for e-commerce sites. It will
also list your content categories, decided at the structuring stage.
This is all part of the ‘persistent’ navigation that is found on every
page.
You can also offer ‘local’ navigation, specific to individual pages.
This shows what is on offer, not across the site, but at the level
your user is currently at. Steve Krug (2000) believes a common