Re: User interface suggestions

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 01:18:49AM -0700, Dick Karpinski wrote:
> A lot of the justification for icons comes from a study which found 
> them effective in a very narrow range of circumstances. When you have
> fewer than five or more than ten, for instance, user testing indicates
> that words do better. This is but one of the many poorly understood 
> results that Jef Raskin addresses in his The Humane Interface. If you
> care about these issues, you owe it to yourself to read the book.
It's interesting that this was one of the principles behing the
open look ui dialogue controls -- a very few shapes were used.
A triangle wasused to indicate a pop-up menu, an oval for a button,
a square for a choice.  This was very effective, although at the
time a lot of people said that "oval buttons are ugly, we have to
have square ones like we're used to".  Today you might not get that
reacion, although an internal redesign of open look at Sun introduced
a single menu bar with rounded ends and diagonal splits between items,
which looked very classy.

Having said all that, the combination of well-chosen icon shapes and
colour can certainly be effective - it's a wonderful feature of gnome
that a lot of default icons are supplied to aid recognition.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999