
Usability Engineering
Unfortunately, metaphors may mislead users, or users'
under-
standing of the computer may be limited to those aspects that can
be
inferred from the metaphor [Halasz and Moran
1982].
For
example,
the metaphor "a word processor is like a typewriter" will
help users discover features like backspace and scrolling, but may
prevent them from looking for a global replace feature.
As
another example, the operation "delete
file"
has often been
metaphorized in graphical user interfaces, with icons like a trash
can,
a paper shredder, and even a black hole used to represent dele-
tion. Even though the black hole cannot be said to b