icons can be perceived as having different meanings in different cultures. not only can some icon imagery offend international users but they're meaning can be misunderstood because of the lack of equivalents in a particular culture.
this is one of the reasons why there is a set of ISO international symbols, etc. On Jan 9, 2008 9:14 PM, Michael Micheletti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 9, 2008 12:04 PM, Grady Kelly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > 1. Which are better, Icons or Labels? Are icons perceived > differently > > in different languages? > > > > I don't know about better or not, but when faced with the same decision > last > year at our company, I worked up a set of icons that could be used on our > controls. It took a long time and many review cycles. We made tooltip text > localizable for the graphical controls. The application originally had the > worst of all worlds: text displayed in graphics on control surfaces. > > It's my understanding that using symbols instead of text for controls is > periodically attempted as a way to avoid localization of control surface > text, but that these efforts are not always successful. I ended up doing a > fair amount of research into international symbols along the way to try to > avoid pitfalls. > > I might not have made the same decision if I was creating an application > for > a kiosk, or for a pop-in-and-out-of-it web page. Ours is a communications > application for trained operators, so it's understood that some > hop-on-board > time is needed. I've also had some previous experience designing icon > symbol > sets for specialized applications, so I mostly knew what I was getting > into. > > Unexpected benefit: the eye-candy aspect of making the symbols light up > pretty for the various control states got our dev team excited about the > redesign. > > Hope this helps, > > Michael Micheletti > ________________________________________________________________ > *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* > February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA > Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > -- -------------------------------------------------- www.flyingyogi.com -------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
