While a picture or icon can be worth a thousand words they can be
just as hard or harder to find the correct image to represent a
concept to everyone. Even w/in N American culture i find that
creating icons for projects the most contencious and divergent point
in projects, so much so i try and avoid them if i can since they end
up costing a lot in time and anguish. Dont get me wrong, i love them,
but with the non profit and education markets i work in the cost for
simple icons can be a major ticket item! Its funny to look at the
suggestions i get from folks to begin with then their comments on the
design rounds -- many times they end up being 180 from where someone
started (yes this happens in many parts of projects, but always
happens with icons). they say it should look like x and you do
something like x and they comment later why did you use x and not
y... Its just that good icons/glyphs take a lot of work to get good.
one place small pictons really worked when everyone thought they
wouldnt was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the Deep Link exhibit
interface when i first did it 16 years ago. The aquarium thought we
would have to use a set of text lists to organize and call up the 300
odd video clips they had then. I too one mental picture of this and
recoiled. These were the days of still only 16 colors in toolbook,
but i went ahead and did video grabs on the mac (ironically i could
show them in colorized HC on the mac, but the final version had to
run on the PC) and did some fiddling to drop them to 16 colors. in
the end i was able to come up with these little 16 color pictons that
ended up working smashingly well. even though each piction had a two
line (20 characters each label), the presenters could not take the
time to read names, but the pictons ended up being a great visual
represnetation of the clips after they practiced on the system for a
while. the full color, larger pictons on the current system i find
actually harder to glance at quickly and find what i want, even
though they are clear for a first time user to see what they want.
Since everything has to be pretty we had to keep it full color even
though the cruder versions might have worked better for the expert
system approach!
cheers,
Jeffrey Reynolds
On Jun 19, 2006, at 12:58 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
That's why we have tooltips and reference manuals...and some of us
display on-screen contextual help at each step in a process. I
suggest
that once the user understands the meaning of an icon within a
specific
application, she/he will recognize that icon in subsequent windows in
the application more quickly than identifying a string of text.
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