Imagine you awaken to find yourself on a boat out at sea and you are the only human onboard. The small sailing vessel, one you could reasonably pilot yourself, bobs up and down on an open blue ocean, with no shore in sight. Wait, scratch that, you are watching another person in this predicament – your view is an empathetic 3rd person omniscient – you see and share the feelings of a frightened human lost at sea.

Our unwitting sailor is surrounded by ropes (sheets, and rigging) leading to a mast and a winch that when engaged tighten the sheet and raise the sails. Mechanisms that are needed to pilot a sailboat surrounds them. They look around to orient themselves. With no prior experience sailing a ship, beyond rowing in a kayak, the landlubber is not sure where to start. Realizing the full weight of the predicament and with an eagerness to survive they start reasoning based on their limited knowledge, relying on visual cues and symbols. Their best course of action is to experiment, but to avoid doing something irreversible or fatally incorrect; they are timid to act. “What happens when I crank this winch upwards just a little?” they think.

When you enter into an application for the first time, especially one where there is a chance to break something you can become paralyzed, afraid. New information surrounds you and you can’t quite understand which button to push to reach your destination. Knowledge you have gained from life experience is the way in which you attempt to make sense of a new interface. As if you were lost at sea there is an immensity that surrounds you and it may feel like there is no one there to answer your cries for help.

Now our novice sailor has found the navigation on the bridge it seems simple enough, North, Eeast, South, West, ignoring sub menus (NE-SE-SW-NW), they figure going due East is the best course of action, it’s only a 50/50 shot that they will have to cross an entire ocean.

Let’s imagine now that our sailor finds a pamphlet on how to sail a ship on board and reads the whole thing just as a gust of wind rips it from their hands and lands it in the ocean. The pamphlet used terms like jib, tack, helm, keel, boom, starboard and now they are feeling even more lost. Don’t forget their life's on the line here. What they remember is halyards are the lines which hold up the sail. They are surprised to learn that the strongest force for forward propulsion in this triangular sail ship is at a ninety degree angle to the wind, an unexpected tid-bit.

Jargon in dissappearing instructions (like a timed modal popup) the user is left in worse shape than they were before. If it turns out that these “new” words are crucial for communicating about the specific parts of a system they should be introduced before a moment of important decisions. It is possible to teach a motivated community new terms.

The experience designer understands that a new interface is intimidating, and recognizes where the user is trying to “sail” to make that process as simple as possible.

I don’t use this analogy because of the popular terminology in product development to “ship”, the often used phrase meaning to get product X (code + design) out to the masses in rpoduction. But like a sailboat, no software product ever reaches a finished state. How many fathoms deep does this analogy go? The hull of the ship, that is the browser window. Lifeboats are modals. The deck is the home page, and subsequent floors are deeper pages in the sitemap, and the portholes are links to new sites. The anchor is a bookmark, the bridge is a navigation bar, the rudder is the invisible hand of the designer…