Easy on the icons! (was Re: Native GUI Squeak?)
Alan Kay
Alan.Kay at disney.com
Sun Feb 18 01:27:39 UTC 2001
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
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