Re: Icon Love (long-ish)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

ons 2002-01-23 klockan 16.52 skrev Tuomas Kuosmanen:
>     I vote one set of icons for the world.  Tigert gave most of the reasons
>     why.
>     
>     It's funny he mentions the "A->Z" sort icon - I just flagged that on the
>     Forte For Java product.  While "A" might be universally understood as
>     representing a character glyph (and I emphasize the word "might"), I
>     doubt "A->Z" is remotely universal.
>     
>     Let's face it, it is very difficult to come up with a universal icon
>     that people from all over the world can simply look at and understand
>     what it represents.  What the icons do is jog the memory.  A tool tip or
>     help message initially provides a clue, and once a user has used the
>     icon a couple of times, they then associate it with the action.  So,
>     maybe a simple graduated down arrow would be sufficient for "ascending
>     sort".
> 
> That could also work. Well, the letters are there as a clue to indicate
> it is to sort some data, not to do a gradient or such. But yea, I think
> the arrow helps those who dont get the A->Z thingy.

I don't think so. The letters A and Z doesn't help me understand the
icon if other "range" characters are used in my alphabet, and are only
distracting since they are irrelevant if you can't decipher their
meaning, but their prominent placement in these icons *does* suggest
that they are relevant, which should leave a lot of users puzzled if
they can't decipher the meaning of A and Z.

If you are only going to rely only on the arrow, you should remove the
letters completely. If they are not helping with the understanding of
the icon, they are a distraction, and especially since they are such a
prominent part of it.


"A to Z" is not a concept that many users of localized interfaces grasp
as "sort order", unless they are used to using the English interface
(which shouldn't be a requirement anyway), or can make a long mental
reasoning about it like this:

  "this button has the letters A and Z and an arrow, what does it mean,
oh wait, this application was originally in English, and the letters A
and Z are the first and last letters of the *English* alphabet I think,
hence this must mean sort"

I know a lot of users that would *never* make that connection,
especially since the rest of the application usually is well localized,
and thus they never have to figure out "what is this in English?". Heck,
some may not even know that the application was originally written in
English! ;)


>     In the case of the 'B' and 'i' type icons I would suggest using a simple
>     label with formatting on the button. Easy to l10n then. Yes it mightn't
>     look as nice but it works, and it will work now. I'm not sure about the
>     idea of providing "icon_de.png"-type images as this will put the onus on
>     us to work with the images.
> 
> I think I'll stick with A's. It'll make everything easier, and heck, our
> goal is not to please everyone by tickling their ethnic identity by
> doing the ultimately customized i18n experience, but to make programs
> that are understandable. There are more important things to spend our
> efforts on than to do icons that follow the colors of your country's
> flag or something. :-)

Some things makes sense to localise, others are harder to motivate. The
"A->Z" sort order icon sure is one of the former, since it affects all
languages that doesn't happen to use A and Z as the first and last
letters of the alphabet.
Or consider redesigning it completely, so that it doesn't use "A->Z" at
all. Pretty please?


Christian