ron%brl-bmd@sri-unix.UUCP (07/09/83)
From: Ron Natalie <ron@brl-bmd> I have mixed feelings about these too. I could figure out lock (shift lock), sun (brightness), half moon (contrast between highlighted/non-highlighted), (1,0) on/off, and the variety of arrows for tab, backtab, carriage return, linefeed, newline. The cute proof readers marks for insert and delete characters required me to think a little. I couldn't figure out for the life of me what the knob with the AND gate on it was (bell volume) or the trapasoid with the lines inside it (key click) were. Another problem is even though some great American (english) mind thinks these are great symbols, are they really culture independant? An example, when in Italy I drove quite few different European cars. All had controls and idiot lights with Icons. Again it was guess work that the cross shaped thing was the choke on the truck I was driving. The pretty much standard oil light and a funny thing on it that looked like what I use to water my plants. What I think of when I think OIL CAN is a hemispherical container with a long neck protruding from the center of the sphere. So it was quite a while before I reasoned what that was. -Ron
STEINBERG@RUTGERS.ARPA (07/11/83)
I've been working recently on a Xerox Dolphin (Lisp machine, bitmapped screen, window-oriented software), and would like to add a piece of hard data to the discussion of icons: When I've been working for a while the screen gets kind of cluttered with various windows, menus, etc. The advantage of icons is that it seems easier to me to pick some item out of the clutter if I can recognize it by shape/picture than if I have to read the words in it to see what it is. -------
msc@qubix.UUCP (07/12/83)
Once again you're are missing the point about icons. The idea is
that once you know what they mean you can recognize them much faster
than the equivalent words. I don't know of anyone who claims that
that icons are immediately and precisely recognisable.
Think how much worse shape you would have been in if the chokes in
the various cars had been labelled in the the language of the
country where the car was made. I know the problem; I was born in
Europe. It's not easy. That's why we developed standard pictorial
road signs and in-car controls. The fact that you can recognise the
pictorial road sign much faster than the equivalent string of words
(even when they are in a language you understand) helps enormously too.
--
Mark
...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!qubix!msc
...{ittvax,amd70}!qubix!msc
decwrl!qubix!msc@Berkeley.ARPAREM%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (07/26/83)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC> Perhaps equipment with icons (automobiles, terminals, ...) should come equipped with an alternate set of decals to replace the standard ones. The customer could stick on the ones that were easiest to understand, although all would be moderately understandable to everyone. Or maybe for anti-theft, everyone could install totally private decals, like private "in" jokes and puns etc. For me, a picture of a sexy female would be "on" (turn on) and a picture of Marcy Tallman would be "off" (yuck!! - turn off). Left turn could be a picture of some cassette tape I left at folk dance a few years back. Right turn could be a picture of Carl Sagan because he's right about a lot of stuff. Imagine somebody jumping into my car and trying to steal it before I get back to it, with all those private jokes to distract and confuse? Ditto my detachable keyboard on some public terminal with keys all in different places from normal (Dvorak or whatever, plus qxz redefined to be control keys, and at least one random key turning the keyboard offline until a password is typed), with obscure decals only I understand, when I momentarily leave my keyboard unattended?