Vongehren%OFFICE-12@sri-unix.UUCP (06/22/83)
My current work has brought me to the question as stated in the subject. Rather
than elaborate on it in this message, I would like to make contact with others
who would be able to contribute to the discussion. I will, however, briefly
state a few of the questions which fall out of this:
A - Do you think that the current interest in the use of icons on terminals and
computer displays is just a passing fad?
B - Aren't some of the current 'graphics' just a little too 'cute' e.g. IBM
upper-case 'lock'. Is this just a sign of an immature field? Will the
marketplace tolerate this long enough for growth and maturity to occur?
C - What must happen for this field to mature?
D - Standardization of Signs and Symbols has occurred in other fields, e.g.
Traffic. Is there any effort to standardize within the computer field? Should
this be done?
E - Are there any obvious indicators for when it is inappropriate to use an icon
in place of a word?
F - What would you offer as guiding principles for the use of icons in computer
displays? Will these differ for icon use on keyboards?
I'll be glad to hear from you if you are willing to do some (or have done some)
thinking on these issues.
Ed vonGehren,
Bell-Northern Research
-------laura@utcsstat.UUCP (06/26/83)
I am posting this because I dont know how to reach you (Vogehren@OFFICE-12). If you want to send mail to me, please find out how mail from the usenet is supposed to be addressed so that it will get to you rather than come back to me with a nasty message about "attempted break-in of ARPA security". I have had rotten luck lately with mail, and if anyone is keeping track I have probably already been labelled as "dangerous foreign spy with multiple attempts to crack security on multiple machines" -- and all I want to do is *TALK* to five different people on the Arpa-net. Tonight I am in a cynical mood; tomorrow everything may look rosier --- but i doubt it. The problem with "cute" things is that they catch on among the illiterate and/or stupid users. If computers are going out to the masses then I think we are stuck with "cute". There are a lot of people who cant read; there are even more who dont want to read. I read that a 1975 survey reported that only 19% of Americans reported reading even *one* non-work related book a year. If you forget the people whose one book was the novelisation of the movie hit of the year or a Harlequin romance you are left with the staggering figure that 9% of the population of the USA is buying all the books. These figures did not include magazines or school textbooks, but nonetheless the very magnitude of the problem is enough to make your blood run cold. Canada is no better, I am sure. My mother teaches grade 8 and the single worst thing she can say to her class is "Today we are going to spend the next 2 hours reading." For the past five years she has kept a record, and to date she has found only three or four students who actually admitted to READING for PLEASURE. I dont know what one can do about this. When I recognise how much of everything I do is based on things that I have read I begin to conclude that anyone who doesnt read just isnt quite human. Then I remember that it is I who is in the minority; it is I who is not quite human. Be that as it may, the conclusion that can be drawn is that people who do not read do not apreciate "cleanness, conciseness and elegance in ideas". Most ideas are found in books -- unless you read or travel you are imprisoned with the local ideas of your area with only the television or the movie theater to bring you other ideas. Most of tv is dreck, and most watchers of tv arent watching the documentaries on PBS. TV and movies are both visual media also, and do little or nothing to present abstract ideas. TV and movies both exploit the themes of adventure and so-called "human interest" -- it is impossible to show on a screen the precise mental glow you get when your compiler starts generating correct code, or you understand some of the significance of E=mc**2. You can present the information and hope that the lights go on in somebody's head, but you cannot do it for him. How much easier it is to show a shark eating a swimmer... But what, you may be asking, has this to do with ICONS? Everything. If you want to sell to the functional illiterates then you are going to have to be understood by them. I go down to the local shopping centre and see that most people have difficulty with the simplest menu-driven "show me where the shoe stores are" type of computer aid. The have trouble understanding simple commands like "push the panel beside the type of store you want". What do they like? The pictures. The silly sleezy drawings that crunch the CPU so much to draw that those of us who know what we are doing wish there was some way the touch-panels had "touch-ahead" because we dont need a picture of a book to know that we want a book store, and we could do without the wait for the drawing of the various pictures. ICONS, I am afraid, are here to stay -- at least in devices that will be made available to John Q. Public. They have to be. Old JQ thhks that E.T. is a much better movie than "Das Boot". Cute friendly monsters are "in" now, but "cute" is always in. Old JQ needs picures because JQ doesnt read -- and any manufacturer interested in selling to the public understands this and will continue to sell "cute". Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
ravi@hcr.UUCP (Ravi Pandya) (06/26/83)
Whew! You certainly were feeling cynical -- but your article had a lot of unpleasant (but true) points that set my thoughts on a path they haven't been along in a while. It is quite chilling to see how few people use their intelligence at all (let alone to its full capacity). Following the rise of anti-science movements like the Creationists, the more rabid of the ecology groups (although some of them have many valid and intelligent points), the mystic and pseudo-scientific cults (like the Scientologists that our windows look down upon), over the last few years gives the impression of an almost palpable fear of rational and scientific thought, a kind of "look where thinking has brought us -- let's stop thinking" attitude. If anything is going to destroy us, I think this is the prime candidate, for people who don't think can be swayed with ease by any skilful demagogue with a bit of media coverage. Look at Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States, a "world superpower", in command of enough power to destroy the earth many times over -- a B-grade movie actor. (Pierre Trudeau, despite his faults, is a well-read, well-educated, well-travelled, intelligent man -- he toured through the Third World on a motorcycle in his thirties to get first-hand experience with the conditions there). So what is there to be done? It would be impossible to give 180 million Americans (I'm still amazed by that figure!) an idea of what that sense of wonder, of discovery, of enlightenment is really like, and (cynically) if you try something of that massive a scope, you're simply going to be disappointed. I content myself with designing tools that make those who do want to think and create more effective at the task, and perhaps to make the activity seem less foreign to those unaccustomed to it. Despite their "cuteness", the iconic referents and similar graphical user-interface techniques are the best way that I can see to do that. If you don't have to spend your time fighting your way through the Sargasso Seas of the abysmal user interface facilities of Unix (which is one of the better traditional systems), then you can spend more time solving the problem you're working on. CPU power requirement isn't the issue -- mind power requirement is. Computer science suffers greatly from the archaic idea that the computer is still the expensive part of the system, and many people waste much time adapting themselves to computer systems that are well-designed, but with the wrong set of design parameters; the designers tried to minimize demand on the computer rather than demand on the user. "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think" [I think either George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde] --ravi
ravi@hcr.UUCP (Ravi Pandya) (06/26/83)
I have some more detailed comments on the use of icons that didn't get into my previous article because I was more concerned with the issues that Laura raised. So, for what they're worth, here are my thoughts on the issue. A - I am quite pleased to see the use of icons and other visual techniques in computer systems, and I certainly hope (and think) it will continue, for a couple of reasons. To begin, I think that because computers have been communicating using a medium that is highly abstract and symbolized (print) they have been limited in their usage to those who are willing to take the time required to master the many inconsistent, illogical, and complex symbol systems that software designers have seen fit to inflict upon their "lusers" (that term itself holds a wealth of information about why things are as they are). Thus, many people have been unable to take advantage of the "augmentation of the intellect" (to use Engelbart's term) that a well-designed computer system can bestow upon its user, and have been wasting much time with less efficient media; on the other hand, those who have taken the time to learn such systems have been wasting much time fighting with systems that were, in many cases, actively preventing them from doing what they wanted to do. I also think that computer science has suffered greatly from its incestuous nature (e.g. computer systems are designed by computer scientists for the use of other computer scientists who are designing computer systems) in the development of some rather gross mutations (for an excellent example, take a close and critical look at C some day and ask yourself if it can be anything else but a rather virulent form of conceptual cancer), and the rise in the use of graphical and visual techniques may provide some cross-fertilization from the very different, lively, and creative field of graphic design (as well as other related areas). B, C - The cuteness of which you speak is frequently a result of poorly-designed iconic systems -- the concept of "shift lock" has in fact little to do with a picture of a lock, and so the process of establishing a connection is closer to figuring out the punch line of a joke than understanding a piece of visual communication. Effective visual communication is not "cute", it simply gets the message across cleanly and quickly. D - Standards are a rather moot point. I would inevitably pick a creatively, effectively designed system over one that rigidly follows a standard that is a mediocre compromise (as standards tend to be). I think that encouraging good design is more important than establishing a standard, but the latter at least avoids having to learn seventeen different mediocre systems -- with a standard, you only have to learn one mediocre system (and with a good system, you hardly need to learn it at all -- it meshes with the way you think so well that the boundary between you and the system disappears entirely). E - For guidelines on the use of icons, a good source is the well-established body of knowledge in the graphic arts. Icons, because they operate below the symbolic (linguistic) level, are appropriate when they represent a package of concepts that can be grasped almost intuitively without having to really "think" about them at all. So using an icon in the middle of a sentence of words (like those oh-so-cute children's books) is a very ineffective way to communicate, as you have to make a connection between two widely separated modes of understanding. Icons *can* be arranged in structural relationships as words can, but only when the relationships can also be expressed in a simple, graphic, and visual manner -- a dependency network, for example. F - My idea of guiding principles for the use of icons, other than those above, are the same as for the design of any interactive system: solve the most general problem in a way that gives the user the most power with the least conceptual clutter; if you do this, and don't let your design be limited by short-sighted concerns about "efficiency", you can usually create something for which there exists an elegant, general, and very efficient algorithm. You thus end up with a much, much better system and pay a small price in "efficiency" for a large gain in effectiveness. Well, I guess it's time to get off the soapbox now. Good luck. --ravi ...!decvax!hcr!hcrvax!ravi
brucec@orca.UUCP (07/07/83)
IN-REPLY-TO: Vongehren@OFFICE-12 Wed Jun 22 00:50:00 1983 Subject: ICONS: Passing Fad or New Found Wisdom? I meant to write this article and get it out to the net some time ago, but got caught up in work, and completely forgot that I intended to do it. Since this is a subject about which I have strong feelings, and since it relates to the work that I do, I decided "better late than never," and went ahead to write this. A - Do you think that the current interest in the use of icons on terminals and computer displays is just a passing fad? No. The purpose of icons is to increase the bandwidth of the information channel from a computer to a user. It is a well-established principle that people can recognize relatively abstract geometric symbols faster than clusters of words in a language they can read. That's not to say that the recognition of an icon can't be aided, especially for new users of a system, by one well chosen caption word. It seems to be the time in cmprehending multiple words as phrases that slows down the recognition of written symbols. The experienced user can easily ignore a caption, or even recognize it as part of the abstract shape of the icon rather than a word (I doubt you perceive the writing on a stop sign as a word after years of driving). I make no claim that icons can or should be "instantly recognizable" in any sense without a period of training in recognition of the icons in use on a system. I do claim that once trained, a user can operate faster using familiar icons than text. B - Aren't some of the current 'graphics' just a little too 'cute' e.g. IBM upper-case 'lock'. Is this just a sign of an immature field? Will the marketplace tolerate this long enough for growth and maturity to occur? I agree that there seems to be more marketing than cognitive psychology in the design of a lot of icons. Oh, well, it doesn't really hurt anything but the feelings of people who want this field to be taken seriously. The real questions in the design of icons are distinguishability between different icons on a given system, and size and complexity of shape. Even the cutest icon becomes just a shape to be recognized after enough use (as an experiment, try writing the word "thrash" down on paper and staring at it for a while. Pretty soon, it stops looking like a word.). C - What must happen for this field to mature? I don't see anything that will stop it from maturing. For the market to take thsi form of interface seriously, it has to become easily available (i.e. cheap), and easily usable (i.e. fast). The economics of the microcomuter industry guarantee that this will happen, as more powerful hardware gets cheaper, and as more powerful operatin systems become more common. As long as there is a paradigm held in front of the vendors in the marketplace, giving the less inovative of them a model to copy, then progress will continue. As flawed as I think the Xerox Star and Appple Lisa are, they have provided such paradigms. Enough vendors are working on copies or extensions of these models that I think the field has the critical mass to keep going. D - Standardization of Signs and Symbols has occurred in other fields, e.g. Traffic. Is there any effort to standardize within the computer field? Should this be done? Having been involved in the standards process in the computer field, I can truthfully say that everyone wants a standard - his own. The field of iconic interfaces is too new for standards to be desirable, since we don't yet know what we want. It's probably best to leave things alone until something like a de facto standard arises. E - Are there any obvious indicators for when it is inappropriate to use an icon in place of a word? Clearly there is amaximum number of distinguishable icons in a system, depending on the criteria used for desired speed of recognition. The less often an icon is used, the less recognizable it is. So sometimes it's better to use a word or two than an icon that the user has never seen before. Icons can be ambiguous in some circumstances, so for communication requiring great precision (error messages from the computer fro instance) icons are not desirable. And I for one would rather see a text string saying "the building is on fire" than a little picture of a house with flames coming out. F - What would you offer as guiding principles for the use of icons in computer displays? Will these differ for icon use on keyboards? I can't offer any guiding principles since I haven't yet gone through the cycle of designing and testing the effect of a set of icons. I will point out that the legends on a keyboard necessarily have a different look from the icons on a display screen, due to the difference betweem reflective and luminant shades, the texture of the surfaces, and the lower resolution of the key legend. This means that key legends must be more cartoon-like (hard edges, high contrast, etc.) than screen icons. To date, most of the icons I've seen on screens have been cartoon-like, possibly with some use of gray scale half-toning. I suspect that this is more a lack of imagination than a basic limitation of the technique. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!teklabs!tekecs!brucec CSNET: tekecs!brucec@tektronix ARPA: tekecs!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay