Re: Icons for page types

[Jim Campbell <jwcampbell gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:

Hi folks,

In Yelp 3, we have the location entry which displays an icon
alongside the title of the page you're viewing.  Icons are
also shown in the history dropdown.  And as of this week,
I have them in an auto-complete dropdown when you type into
the search field.

See my blog post for an idea of how the icons look:

http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/2010/03/11/more-yelp-3-0-location-entry/

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.

Thoughts?

--
Shaun

This is a bit orthogonal to the question, but I thought about this some over the weekend.  With the various icons in place, I wonder if it is clear to users that they can search from the search/selection box.  The search icon only appears when the user clicks in the box and begins typing.

Does anyone else see this?  

Jim