Re: [Usability] Re: close icon is misleading

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Sun, 2003-09-14 at 15:46, Maxwell Terpstra wrote:
> --From: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> > The main issue right now is that there are loads of
> > buttons in dialogs that don't have icons ...
> > IIRC it's also a bit of extra effort to make the
> > icons on 'custom' buttons themable
> 
> Why are those so many different buttons in the first place?

Because people don't follow specs. Your mail client being a good
example. text/plain mail messages are supposed to wrap at 72 characters.
However, all the mail from you seems to flow to some odd extreme.

>   Why are custom buttons even allowed?  It seems to me, there should be a standard set of buttons that do standard things, and if you want to do something else, you shouldn't use a button (for example, to chose how to handle a cookie, show a radio list of options, plus a standard "ok" button).
> By making a limited set of standardized buttons, you're not only solving the problem of unknown buttons without an icon, but, in my view, providing a more consistant interface which is easier to use.

Limiting what buttons can say/do presents many more problems than it
solves. We should just get rid of "OK" completely anyway, since it's
not really translatable, and is nominally used as an adjective, rather
than an adverb or transitive verb, making it even more inappropriate.
And the transitive verb form of OK doesn't make sense for most all of
the cases where "OK" is used in a dialog. I'd also vote for an addition
to the HIG to state that one should not be asking the user to authorize
the dialog box they just changed settings or entered some text in, or
informed them of an error or whatever.

> Can anyone give me an example of a situation that NEEDS to have a non-standard button? And if the cases are so few, couldn't these uses be standardized as well?

The future. Since you can't predict it, you shouldn't break it. Also,
using the same icon for 300 different words is just wrong. The icons
need to be associative. Sweeping the dust under the carpet doesn't get
rid of it. It simply moves it to another location.

> --From: Dan Zlotnikov <dzlotnik perpugilliam csclub uwaterloo ca>
> > That advantage [of using icons] breaks down
> > spectacularly when inappropriate icons are selected
> 
> which is why it should be a concern of the HIG..
> 
> > ... or a complex concept must be presented. Care to
> > come up with an icon for "create new template"?
> 
> Most of the time, complex actions like this are not handled by a dialogue, but rather by a command structure in the program itself (ie. your example does not really apply, because - taking MS Word as an example - it would be an option in the "File" menu of the program).  In all other cases of which I am aware, the complex action can and should be split into simplier components, which in the end include a simple, standardized button.

I don't quite understand what you mean by this. There is a rather large
difference between "complex" and "overly complex" operations. The latter
is what tends to be the real problem. "Create New Template" should
probably actually be "Save as Template", because, in this case, it's the
save action that matters, not the create action. On create, it's still
just a blank document. Nor was his comment about dialogs in particular.
The point was about misleading icons (welcome to the real conversation).
In case you haven't read your mail (which, seems to be the case), the
conversation only started out complaining about the "Close" dialog icon,
and has since expanded into a discussion about the validity of all other
stock icons, or perhaps not only stock, since toolbar icons, etc... also
have many similar issues. And, as an example as to something that would
NEED a custom icon, the toolbar is a great one.

> --From: Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>
> > Perhaps images should be "translated" also. Then we
> > would have different versions of images, for 
> > different languages, and the proper metaphors and
> > contexts could be used
> 
> ..and with a standard button set this would be trivial to do via theming.

No, it wouldn't. Translating icons isn't exclusive to the stock icons.
All icons that could be better expressed by a different image in a
different language should be translated. Limiting the number of stock
icons only reduces the problem by a very minute amount.


-- dobey

PS: Please use imap/smtp with a sane mail client, or start inserting
    newlines more often in the web client. Thanks. :)