Re: Icon love

[Carl Nygard <cjnygard fast net>]

On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 15:27, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 19:47, jacob berkman wrote:
> >
> >    it would be nice if there were Go icons to complement Stop.
> >
> >Hmm. Good idea. But this time I am wise in advance:
> >
> >    Does anyone know of a country that uses a red standing guy in a
> >    traffic light to indicate "GO!" and a walking green guy to indicate
> >    "Stop!"? As we have learned, you never know... :o)
> 
> Sigh....
> 
> well I understand that in some cultures it's offensive to use 
> representations of humans in icons in the first place ;-)
> 
> so probably there isn't a truly universal answer...
> 
> 
> Much more seriously, it's a bad idea to use red and green to distinguish 
> these since in that case about 2% of the male user population will be 
> unable to tell them apart... (red/green color blindness, actually quite 
> common).  The standing/walking metaphor is probably OK except that the 
> icon might have to be harge-ish in order to distinguish the figure.

A little story that might illustrate other possibilities.  My father is
red/green colorblind, and when I was little, we were driving once and
came to an intersection with horizontal traffic lights (!!), which
prompted me to ask how he could tell to stop or go, since he couldn't
tell the difference between red and green lights, which all looked brown
to him.  

He said normally, one light seems brighter, and based on whether it's
brighter at the top, or the bottom, he knows to stop or go.  I think it
would be the same with colored icons -- colorblind people would
differentiate because the brown/grey on top means stop, and the
brown/grey on the bottom means go.  Just make the other light positions
black.  You could test this simply by creating the icons, and asking
colorblind people if they can differentiate the icons.  I volunteer my
father.

BTW, as far as the horizontal lights were concerned, he didn't have a
clue which way they were oriented, so he took his cues from other
drivers till he figured it out...  made me feel *real* safe.

Regards,
Carl