Cooper: The Myth of Metaphor
“Metaphors offer a tiny boost in learnability to first time users at tremendous cost. The biggest problem is that by representing old technology, metaphors firmly nail our conceptual feet to the ground, forever limiting the power of our software.
There aren't enough metaphors to go around,
The ability of users to recognize them is questionable.
Confusing the issue is the problem that most of what we consider metaphoric interface isn't.”
Alan Cooper: The Myth of metaphor