We lean on how something feels when making a fast judgment.
More quotesThe save icon is a floppy disk. Millions of people recognise it. Plenty have never touched one.
That is the useful joke in skeuomorphism: an obsolete object can survive as an instruction. Folders suggest grouping. Baskets suggest choosing before buying. A shutter sound tells us the phone took a photograph, although nothing mechanical snapped shut. The familiar cue removes the need for a paragraph of help text.
Borrowed familiarity can outstay its welcome. Digital calendars inherit limitations from paper. Online shops reproduce supermarket aisles even when search would serve the customer better. Designers keep an imitation because it once reassured beginners, long after it has started restricting everyone else. The click of a fake camera shutter may reassure; a fake page-turn animation that delays the page soon feels like being trapped behind a man theatrically opening a newspaper.
Purging every old metaphor would be equally daft, especially when the replacement is a minimalist squiggle explained by a twelve-screen tutorial. Familiar things are useful. Keep the cue while people still need what it teaches. Once the behaviour is understood, ask whether the imitation is helping or merely traditional.
I imagine an early car designer insisting on reins because drivers already understood horses. Sensible for the first five minutes. Rather limiting on the motorway.
Good design borrows enough of the past to make the future usable. But if the old object disappeared today, would we still design the new thing this way?