Of note is the authors' commentary on the use of the desktop metaphor:
"The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies. Instead, we need to develop new interface paradigms based on the structure of computer systems and the tasks users really have to perform, rather than paradigms that enshrine outmoded technology. The way to advance the interface is not to develop ever-more-faithful imitations of the desktop, but instead to escape the limitations of the desktop especially as computers themselves become ubiquitous and are used away from the desk."15 years later, has much changed about this desktop interface paradigm? Are tablets and touch technology changing the interface metaphor? Touch technology removes a degree of separation between the user and the content; a mouse and cursor is not required to interact with content. Smaller screen displays force developers to focus on the basics of human cognition in developing applications. The focus becomes less on the application of a metaphor, and more on the intuitiveness of design. I predict that we will witness a growing relationship between the disciplines cognitive psychology and web design. Does this mean that we are abandoning the desktop metaphor? Not really. It's more that touch technology has precipitated us outgrowing it.
In the notebook/desktop space, the desktop metaphor is alive and well. Gentner and Nielson suggest that operating within a metaphorical framework can be constraining (we have seen more recently how Apple can at times be limited within its strictly defined design parameters). The metaphor seeks to teach the user a foreign concept by relating it to something familiar. It seeks to educate through the formation of associations. Interestingly, this is how human learning occurs naturally. We place new knowledge in the context of old. New information assumes its place under a pre-existing schema. It is only when a concept is so foreign and so different, that we must work hard to develop a new schema. This is when learning is difficult.
The desktop metaphor perhaps then has a Piagetian foundation. Our new focus on human cognition, then, is really not so new.
