Re: [Usability] Save Icon

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 31 Jan, 2006, at 2:58 AM, Manu Cornet wrote:
> ...
> There are several cases where icons in menus are *extremely* useful. 
> For example, while using Inkscape, if you want to "Mirror" and object
> horizontally, and without menu icons, you're going to scan each line 
> of text to see which item suits your need. If you have good icons, you
> immediately spot the one you need.

Usability testing is riddled with cases where people think that 
something that makes them slower makes them faster, and vice versa. I 
think if you tested separate sets of people who had never used Gnome 
before, overall they would find menu items more quickly without icons 
than with them.

Where I think icons in menu items are useful is where the icon is 
likely to be more understandable or more recognizable than the text. In 
Inkscape, examples of "more understandable" are the "Union", 
"Difference", "Intersection", "Exclusion", "Divison", and "Cut Path" 
items, and that's about all. Examples of "more recognizable" would be 
"Cut", and the items in the "Open Recent" submenu. (It would make sense 
to generalize the latter as "whenever a menu item represents a file or 
similar resource, include the icon for that resource in the menu 
item".)

Even then, I think icons should either be used for every item in a 
section (between the end of a menu and a separator, or between two menu 
separators), or for none of them, because anything else looks messy. 
For example, "Cut" would not have an icon because it's probably the 
only item in the Edit menu for which the icon is more recognizable than 
the text, and having just one icon in the menu would look weird.

> Same in GIMP for many, many actions you can perform on an image.

Following the above guidelines, items in the Gimp that would have icons 
would be the three "Fill with" items, the items in the "Layer" menu's 
"Colors" submenu and the second half of the "Transparency" submenu, the 
items in the "Tools" menu (only because the toolbox is open so often 
that it makes the tool icons more recognizable than their names), and 
all the items in the "Dialogs" menu (though that menu probably 
shouldn't exist).

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/