Re: Icons for page types

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 13:25 +0000, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 09:59 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> [...]
> > I've been thinking about how best to use the icons.  Users
> > will generally be looking at an individual help file in a
> > single window.  It's not really useful to show the Empathy
> > icon over and over again for every page in the Empathy help.
> > 
> > What I'm considering is having icons for certain common page
> > types.  So we'd have an icon for tasks, overviews, problems,
> > guides, etc.  I think this would be particularly helpful in
> > the auto-complete dropdown.
> 
> I think that this would be helpful too. To be successful, we need to
> make sure that the page types we choose map well onto how users will
> think about them (e.g. will users see a difference between tasks and
> guides?). We also need to use distinctive icons which convey the purpose
> of the different types.

Yeah, good point. So how can we test that? I have a list of
types that matches the way *I* tend to think of things, but
I'm not our target audience.

Could we do some sort of distributed user testing? If somebody
could device a simple test, all of us could test users and
merge our data.

-- 
Shaun McCance
http://syllogist.net/