Easy on the icons! (was Re: Native GUI Squeak?)

C. Keith Ray ckeithray at home.com
Mon Feb 19 01:19:46 UTC 2001


> But that is because Jef doesn't understand what icons were for (see 
> one of my previous replies about this).
>
> At 9:17 PM -0500 2/17/01, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>>>In particular, an *icon* means nothing to me until I can *name* it
>>>audibly.  I can't recall it, I can't recognize it ... until I
>>>sound-out the name of it again, and then I get access to all the
>>>semantics and learning I've had about that *name*, but never the icon
>>>directly.
>>
>>Jef Raskin makes a similar criticism of such use of icons in "The
>>Humane Interface."  An interesting read.

One of the nice things about Netscape is that I can turn off the pictures in
the button-bar, and leave just the worlds.

While finding the image of an elephant among 100 other animal images may be
fast, seeing the difference between the icon for "copy" and the icon for
"paste" -- which in some programs are identical except for the 2 or 4 pixels
representing the the location of the curved arrow's head -- is not fast for
me, and probably not fast for others. Since I use many programs on a daily
basis, and none of them use exactly the same images for any of the common
operations, and they don't put the images in the same order or the same
places on the screen... I just ignore them whenever possible and use the
textual menus, which have standardized names for the common operations, and
are in standardized places most of the time.

Somewhere, there was a very funny description of the icons used in Microsoft
development products like Visual C++. I think it was in the book "Mr.
Bunny's Guide to Active X" or "Mr. Bunny's Big Cup of Java"... the icon to
build your program looks vaguely like a birthday cake with candles on it
(sideways?), so that what the icon is described as... Also (I'm working from
memory here) the image of the developer environment is depicted as having
only a 2 cm by 4 cm area for entering text, since the rest of the screen is
filled with hoards and hoards of toolbars and various docked read-only
windows.

Parenthetically (Another funny thing: looking up "Mr. Bunny's Big Cup of
Java" on Amazon... it says that "Customers who bought this book also bought:
    * Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex by Carlton, III Egremont
    * Mr. Bunny's Internet Startup Game by Chan, et al
    * Extreme Programming Installed(The XP Series) by Ron Jeffries, et al
    * Planning Extreme Programming (The XP Series) by Kent Beck, et al."
I'm sure this relationship comes from Kent Beck recommending the book on the
XP mailing list.)

Speaking of UI criticism, check out the User Interface Hall of Shame,
<http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm> and the the GUI Bloopers book, which
I have observed seems more helpful to the programming masses than many other
books on GUI design, because of all its examples.

----

C. Keith Ray
<http://homepage.mac.com/keithray/resume.html>





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list