Broken Metaphors

The number one cause for bad software design is using the wrong set of metaphors for a solution.

 

Excel and the Macintosh Equivalent (Numbers) is a perfect example. Excel's core-metaphor is functional; but once you spend more than five seconds looking at a Numbers screen you realise that it's wrong. It's wrong for all sorts of perfectly justifiable reasons, mainly historical and compatibility, but it's still wrong.

 

·         Excel: Sheets are full of cells of calculations or data. You can have multiple sheets.

·         Numbers: Pages are full of tables of information. Each table can contain cells of data, calculation, or a mix. Wikipedia calls this a “Layout of lists” metaphor.

 

Essentially numbers separates out how block of information are presented (Pages) from grouping related numbers (Tables) where excel groups them together into the one metaphor (Sheets)

 

So what? Doesn’t introducing more core-metaphors just make the solution harder to learn? Well no, once you have metaphors that match up with how users actually do things other functionality falls into place a lot more naturally.

 

Take for instance formatting of tables. In excel if you have multiple related squares of information you’ve got to adjust the formatting cell by cell, range by range; in Numbers this is more natural as you have a “Table” that can be directly formatted.

 

Or take referencing between tables. In excel lots of users will never use more than one sheet because they don’t feel comfortable using cross-sheet referencing, but in Numbers it’s seamless as you can directly reference a Table and calculation (Total of Sales, instead of “Sales!A23”)

 

It also just makes Excel ugly when used without much thought, where Numbers produces quite clean well laid out pages if just used in the “natural” way.

The Excel product team get this. Recent versions of Excel have a concept of Tables, but they’ve had to hack it on top of the Sheet concept to keep backward compatibility.

 

In summary – if you get the core metaphors right up front then everything else is simpler. Don’t be afraid of making the core metaphor a little more involved; it could save you a lot of complexity in the long run.