On icons --

One of the big misunderstandings about icons is that they are 
supposed to mean something. But this is a very tough area, and hasn't 
worked out well, especially for actions. Look at "Blissymbolics" for 
an interesting attempt from Germany in the 60s.
      We put them in because, for most people, they are more memorable 
and searchable. Take a look at classic experiments by Haber, et. al. 
about most people's visual memories, e.g., how long does it take when 
clicking channels into the middle of a movie to recognize that you've 
seen it before some time (maybe 20 years ago). How long does it take 
to find the elephant from a wall of 100 randomly placed animals as 
compared to words in the same places? (Ans. Most people can find the 
picture 4 times faster.) A very interesting side factlet is that if 
you simple draw a rectangular boundary around the 100 words, the 
search is speeded up by a factor of 2 (you have "iconized" them).

So the basic idea was to have them be, not meaningful per se, but 
memorable and findable.  Putting labels below them is a good idea. 
Having more than a few hundren in a visual field doesn't work very 
well (so all works better for kid sized UIs, which is where the ideas 
came from).

The other part about Bruner's investigations into the "iconic" had to 
do with configurations. Images in a visual field are always in 
relation to each other, so e.g. a map can be much easier to deal with 
for routes than lists of city pairs.
     It turns out that most sonic things are also configurational, and 
follow many of the same rules for memory, etc., that images do. 
Musicians in the crowd who are also into math may have noticed that 
harmony is quite like geometry (especially of the direct 
demonstration type). Bach particularly loved to show (mostly the 
player, it's harder to pick up as a listener) the equivalent of 
congruences and other similarities of structure. As an organist, it 
is amazing the lengths he was able to go to here without compromising 
the musical quality of the works to the outside listeners....

Cheeres,

Alan


At 1:34 AM +0100 2/18/01, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>On 17 Feb 2001, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>
>>  Bert> IMO an interface should allow to safely experiment. You just 
>>click a halo
>>  Bert> handle and you *feel* what it does. That's much better for learning
>>  Bert> than help bubbles.
>>
>>  Well, that "X" icon is a bit non-reversible. :)
>
>But only a bit ;)
>
>Oops! Who disabled preserveTrash by default?
>
>-- Bert