Re: [Usability]Re: Revenge of the Paperless Office

[Janne Morén <jan moren lucs lu se>]

First, I'm new on this list - please flame me whenever I do something
wrong. I'm a doctoral student in cognitive science and have taught a few
classes in usability design - that's not what I'm actually working on,
but that has never stopped the university...

To some extent it is already like this. The full-size Evo icon is round
and yellow; Galeon is blue and bubbly; gnumeric is light blue and
square; x-chat is red/orange and cross-shaped. What might be needed is
to make these properties clearer for the mini-icons, and maybe to make a
point of considering the 'gestalt' (sorry) of icons compared to other
when designing them.

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 21:12, Josh Steiner wrote:
> i agree.  may i suggest that the top 5-10 programs or so (evo, abi,
> gnumeric, mr project, achtung, etc.) should have similar and color coded
> icons?  i really think ms did a great job with their office application
> icons, they are clearly a set, but once you've used them a few times they
> leap out to your eye very quickly.  of course, you can't rely on color for
> the identity alone for obvious accessability reasons, but for us color
> sighted people, it is a great way to quicly detect something familiar.
> 
> -josh
> 
>  On 3 Jul 2002, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On my GNOME 2.0 desktop, I regularly use Evolution, gedit and GNOME
> > Calendar (until I find a quick way to transfer all my appointments to
> > Evo!).  And I use the tasklist to switch between them, which usually
> > looks something like this: http://www.gnome.org/~calum/tasklist.png .
> > 
> > So, is it just me, or do we maybe need to start designing some
> > application icons that aren't just a pencil and a bit of paper at
> > different angles, to stop eejits like me continually switching to the
> > wrong application?  :)
> > 
> > Cheeri,
> > Calum.
> > 
> > -- 
> > CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> > mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
> > http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771
> > 
> > Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
> > 
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> > 
> 
> ___________________________________________________________
> Josh .. Yoshi .. Joschi .. http://eds.org/~joschi/vitriolix
> 
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-- 
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Tel.    +46-046 222 8588             Mr. Jan Morén
Home:   +46-046 211 4973             Dept. of Cognitive Science
Fax:    +46-046 222 9758             Kungshuset, Lund
                                     S-222 22 Lund, Sweden