On 1/23/2012 3:51 AM, foobar wrote:
A few additional points: # Microsoft allegedly does a lot of usability research and they came up with the upcoming Metro design which relies on text instead of icons. # Regarding the English language - Icons are supposed to be universal so it saves money for companies to localize their software. Localized UIs do present a trade off in usability: It depends which terminology is more common, the local or the foreign (English). E.g. "print" is easy to translate and would be intuitive for non techies but "bittorent" probably isn't.
One huge issue with "universal" icons is that each company copyrights theirs. So every user interface uses deliberately different icons.
