[evilduck]

I don't think everyone learns email as a metaphor though.

While I'm old enough to have sent and received paper mail as a means of communication, it's highly likely that my toddler will have sent email (and internalized the concept) before having interacted with physical mail systems. It's a metaphor for us to call it email but it's a vestigial name to the younger generations.

Think of the floppy disk being a metaphor for saving a file. Few people younger than 15 have used a floppy drive but manage to save files regardless. I also understood radio buttons on web forms as exclusive selections as a young person even though I didn't know it was a metaphor for real buttons on old car radios until a couple of years ago.

[thebigpicture]

But a floppy disk is not a metaphor. The metaphor is a "file" as a description for a series of electromagetic charges on a floppy disk.

It is indeed interesting that children may likely interact with email before postal mail. But postal mail shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. Probably not during your lifetime and the lifetime of your startup while you're acquiring a critical mass of users.

Do you think it will be possible to conduct 100% of your affairs in life without ever sending or receiving postal mail? That postal mail will never be used by anyone you transact with?

No doubt we may someday reach a "paperless" world where all your affairs can be handled without every using postal mail. And where people never ever use postal mail and have no reason to even know of its existence. Maybe your children may see this come to pass.

But for the purposes of your startup, is that day something you should be concerned about? Is your target market toddlers? Or people old enough to have credit cards, today? People who know how to use email.

[comex]

I also started using radio buttons long before I learned that they were based on car radios, and once I did so I didn't suddenly start thinking of the buttons as metaphorical; it's just an interesting fact to me. And though I did use floppy disks when I was younger, the idea of a floppy disk no longer even enters my mind when I look for the floppy disk icon; it's just an arbitrary recognizable shape. (The metaphor is "save to floppy disk" as "save to any drive".)

This matters mainly because I won't be bothered if either control starts acting in a way that breaks the metaphor, like a save icon that saves to the cloud (no need to carry a disk around) or a radio button with a design that looks nothing like a car radio (like the current design, as best as I can tell). And it's not black and white: though I've always known a folder is based on a filing cabinet, I've never been bothered that they can be infinitely nested. The more people are familiar with the "metaphor", the less it's necessary to stick to purely metaphorical elements.

[thebigpicture]

I think icons can be arbitrary. That's because I've seen some that are so obviously idiosyncratic to the developer; they bear no relation to the function that I can decipher. Some of them I can't even tell what the heck they are. "WTF is that supposed to be?" It's like your example of the floppy. It's a rectangle. It means save. Does it matter if no one even knows what the heck the icon is supposed to represent? If it's not intuitive? For the first few minutes perhaps until I figure out what the program it represents actually does it matters. Maybe it gives me a clue maybe not. From then on, once I figure it out, it's irrelevant.

This is one of the 1001 reasons I think GUI's are a waste of time. I can just as easily tell a user to hit a particular key (i.e. a tactile button) or type "save". Goodbye ambiguity.

Are icons metaphors? Or are they just symbols?

I am not a linguist but I think that you may be stretching the definition of metapahor if you are thinking of icons as themselves being metaphors.

What is an icon? A button with a superimposed symbol?

Now, if you are saying buttons on a computer screen (which do not necessarily need any symbol superimposed on them to work) are metaphors for physical buttons, e.g. like your example of radio buttons, then that seems a little more reasonable.

I've seen early TV remote controls, 8-tracks and various other old things having push-in buttons just like car radios. I'm not sure car radios were the first to have these. Maybe early radios, before TV, were the first to have push-in buttons (or whatever the proper name for them is)?

[UnFleshedOne]

Typing "save" is very far from being unambiguous though. Should it be "save", "store", "write down", "file away", "preserve" or another one of a few dozen ways an unsuspecting person could come up with? Should you type "please" too? At least with GUI there is a button that semi-obviously can be clicked, even if it is unclear what it does. Discoverability is way better with GUI.

[thebigpicture]

What you find ambiguous may not align with what others find ambiguous. You, as a nerd, know there are many options that "save" could entail. Does everyone else know that?

What if a user has no idea about "save options". To them "save" might just mean "save". That is, they want to be able to retrieve it later.

If I say to you "Jump!", you might ask "How high?" Others might just jump. Should we enlist some participants in a study and see what most people do? Let's ask people what "save" means. Then let's show them a button and ask them what it means.

Why does some software have an option to "show button text"? Why would anyone want to see text on a button? Why would anyone want that?

I wish there was a way I could post to HN in a series of buttons, like hieroglyphics. It would be "way better" than using words. You could click on them and they would bounce up and down. Way better than reading.