A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson. (Jakob Nielsen)

One favorite metaphor I like to use with design teams is that of simple, face-to-face, human interaction. Since I’ve worked in banking most of my career, that typically involves talking about bank branches. You know, where you wait in line for a teller, then go up to the counter, hand material back and forth, talk about the weather, then get a receipt and a lollypop and leave? 

What I like to do in particular is contrast the interaction that the user is having online with what the user might experience in a branch. Would a teller really be that abrupt? Wouldn’t they normally be a little bit more friendly in this particular situation? Would a teller really just stand there looking at you after you did x? Wouldn’t they say something to acknowledge you? Wouldn’t a teller give you a little more information than just that? Wouldn’t they explain some of this a little better? Wouldn’t the two of you have a fairly strong, agreed-upon recognition of what constitutes the beginning and the end of the transaction? Why did you leave the user just kind of standing there?

Now, I’m not saying go all out on anthropomorphization. I’m just pointing out that users already have a mental model in their head (and do tend to anthropomorphize computers anyway), and that keeping that model in mind can definitely help things run a little more smoothly.

Needless to say, these kind of IRL metaphors apply to any kind of online interaction – shopping, asking questions, searching for information, scheduling things … So, if you’re in the business of UX – IA, ID, graphic designer, content – this is going to apply to you too.

One thing I’ve found particularly useful in these situations is something I learned in linguistics, Grice’s maxims. These are basically the linguistic rules for meaningful conversation to happen:

• Quantity – where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
• Quality – where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
• Relation – where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
• Manner – when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.

Follow these in your designs, and you’ll have that human-interaction template down pat!

One final thing … I've only ever seen this quote all by itself. I'm wondering if it was originally combined with another of his famous maxims:

"The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouse click away."

In other words, it’s lot easier to go to another site than go to another brick-and-mortar store. The Internet is not your local mall.