On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 19:31 +0000, Calum Benson wrote: > On 23 Mar 2006, at 18:11, Shaun McCance wrote: > > > > > > > We have a love affair with icons alongside text, but > > we're afraid to let them stand on their own. We even > > default to icons+text toolbars. > > We do, and that's simply because numerous usability studies have > shown that people find icon+text toolbars much quicker to assimilate > than icons alone.
As a mathematician, I've found the stated results of nearly every usability test I've ever seen to be very suspect. They test for something and establish it, and that's all well and good, but people then tend to ignore the use-cases that were controlled out of the experiment and overstate the results. In particular, I constantly see people making their design decisions based on usability tests which test discoverability. I'm not saying discoverability is bad, but it's an entirely different thing than, say, the efficiency of a user who is already *moderately* (not even expertly) familiar with the interface. Tests for that sort of thing seem to be few and far between, while tests on complete newbies are a dime a dozen. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
