Re: [Usability] Ellipsis on buttons

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 19:31 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 23 Mar 2006, at 18:11, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > We have a love affair with icons alongside text, but
> > we're afraid to let them stand on their own.  We even
> > default to icons+text toolbars.
> 
> We do, and that's simply because numerous usability studies have  
> shown that people find icon+text toolbars much quicker to assimilate  
> than icons alone.

As a mathematician, I've found the stated results of nearly
every usability test I've ever seen to be very suspect.  They
test for something and establish it, and that's all well and
good, but people then tend to ignore the use-cases that were
controlled out of the experiment and overstate the results.

In particular, I constantly see people making their design
decisions based on usability tests which test discoverability.
I'm not saying discoverability is bad, but it's an entirely
different thing than, say, the efficiency of a user who is
already *moderately* (not even expertly) familiar with the
interface.  Tests for that sort of thing seem to be few and
far between, while tests on complete newbies are a dime a
dozen.

--
Shaun