Re: [Usability]eye friendlyness :-)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Sun, 2002-08-04 at 18:28, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> sön 2002-08-04 klockan 15.15 skrev Ali Akcaagac:
> > hi, i don't exactly know where to put this there are no exact defined
> > bugzilla entries for this kind of stuff. i doubt that programmers
> > generally care what kind of icons their applications show but it would
> > be cool to get some special 'art' mailinglist or 'art' bugzilla entry,
> > so long i would be happy to see the "system tools" menu entry slighly
> > cleaned up with better icons. as it looks now <attachment> it doesn't
> > really look attractive. hope no one kills me for the 16kb attachment.
> 
> Haha, OT, does System Log has the crappiest icon or what? Hadn't seen
> this before. Though perhaps someone thinks it's pretty clever in English
> but it means _nothing_ in other languages.

Its even used as an example in the HIG for why its bad to make names 
based on puns (i18n and quick recognition). 

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/icons.html#icon_design

"Do not base icons off word puns. This should be avoided for a couple
reasons, the most obvious of which is that puns do not translate well.
For example, representing the "system log monitor" as a log will likely
be uncommunicative in languages other than English. Additionally, most
users do not comprehend the word play until it is too late for the icon
to assist them. Even after being familiar with the "system log monitor"
being represented as a log, users do not form the association fast
enough for the icon to assist through in scanning through menu entries.
A popular instance of this problem was the proliferation of icons
representing the "World Wide Web" as a spider web in the mid 1990s. Part
of the value of icons is that they bypass linguistic comprehension and
hence are complementary to captions, allowing users to utilize more
areas of the mind than linguistic recognition (already used in scanning
for captions) when they hunt for items."

-Seth