I was out at the field today and we had bright sunshine. That is all the displays were at their limits. I looked at the mock up on my iPhone to simulate a PDA, and I found they were not so easy to recognize. They lack contrasting shapes, and they have too much black in them. Maybe a bit less line thickness or more white inside would improve them, and some sort of easily recognizable feature that sticks out: EG the cogwheel could have serious teeth, else it could pass as a dot in marginal visibility conditions. I could imagine not only replacing the text within the buttons by icons, but rather replacing the buttons themselves by icons and making the icons as large as buttons, might improve the ... er ... what's the word? ... recogizability?
Yes Icons ARE tricky. One important trick ist to use a very consistent visual language throughout an application's GUI. This includes making a decision for text vs. icons on the application level rather than on a page level. Icons are only advantageous if the user has already learned to recognize them. For new or inexperienced users or when the icons only appear in one isolated page within the application, text is most likely more (self) explanatory than icons. Viele Grüße, Martin Kopplow --- Am 04.03.2011 um 22:29 schrieb Scott Penrose <sco...@dd.com.au>: > Icons vs Text is tricky. > > Our instinct says that text is better. Firstly there is no learning what > something is. > > But there has been a heap of research into this area, and found that users > have to spend far less time looking at a screen to find an icon than they do > reading text. Our brains are wired to see shapes and icons, not text. > > Scott > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What You Don't Know About Data Connectivity CAN Hurt You This paper provides an overview of data connectivity, details its effect on application quality, and explores various alternative solutions. http://p.sf.net/sfu/progress-d2d _______________________________________________ Xcsoar-user mailing list Xcsoar-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcsoar-user
