Metaphors We Surf the Web By
Paul P. Maglio Teenie Matlock
pmaglio@almaden.ibm.com tmatlock@cats.ucsc.edu
Introduction
The World-Wide Web (WWW) is part of a network of geographically distributed machines connected via wires. The information accessible by users of this physical network is organized in a conceptual network of hyperlinks among documents. Despite this actual structure, people's conceptual structure of the WWW is rather different. In previous research, we found that web users often refer to the WWW as a multidimensional (most commonly two-dimensional) landscape (Matlock & Maglio, 1996). Obtaining information in this landscape is expressed as traversing interconnected paths toward locations that contain information objects, such as user homepages and commercial catalog sites. Users say things such as, "I went to his homepage," and "I came back to where I saw that picture." Some of these information objects are talked about as two-dimensional and others, as three-dimensional; for instance, people say "in Yahoo!" which suggests a three-dimensional container, and "at AltaVista" which suggests a point on a two-dimensional plane. Though there are many ways in which people might talk about the WWW (see Benyon & Hvvk, 1997, and Stefik, 1996), the fact that they naturally talk about it in this particular way is no accident. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and others have argued, such metaphorical language is motivated by metaphorical thought (see also Gibbs, 1994).
The way people think about the web has implications for the way that they navigate the web. Based on data collected from people asked to recall specific WWW searches, Maglio and Barrett (1997a) argued that navigation in the information space of the WWW is conceived as a cognitive map similar to a cognitive map of physical space, that is, in terms of landmarks and routes. If people mentally structure web use in this way, tools for web navigation ought to present the web in this way (Maglio & Barrett, 1997b). In addition, a user's view of the web can be personalized to reflect his or her interests and history of interactions (Barrett, Maglio, & Kellem, 1997). In any event, we believe the key to designing information navigation tools lies in discovering how people conceive of information spaces.
In the present paper, we discuss the nature of people's metaphorical conception of the WWW. We set out to investigate how users with varying levels of expertise talk about the web. In what follows, we briefly describe two experiments. The first involves semantic rating judgments from experienced and inexperienced users of sentences expressing various sorts of metaphorical motion on the web. The second experiment involves verbatim reports elicited from these participants when relating what they did while using the web. In the end, we briefly discuss implications of these results for the design of tools for navigating information spaces.