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For GUIs, Just the Right Degree of Realism
mr crypto writes "User interfaces make copious use of pictures and symbols, but how abstract should images be? Lukas Mathis has an interesting blog entry on where to draw the line."
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Of the period in the early to mid 90's when pretty much every second-string audio player program, and there were a fair few in those days, decided that the One True Interface for any audio program was an inscrutable bitmap reproduction of a knobs-n'-sliders 70's stereo system?
He repeats himself a lot of times by saying the same things over and over. It's like he could have said all he said in one sentence. The article didn't contain a lot of information, it was mostly the same sentence in different words. I think the article was very repetitive, even though it was an original thought to me. The article makes good work of giving a lot of good examples of this concept.
Redundancy turns precious information to noise.
Well much like the TFA stated it is really a balancing act. Adding enough detail to get the point across but not to much to make it distracting or to detailed for the concept. Colors and gradients do help when used correctly. Eg. when you represent a button it will need to be colored in a way that it appears to be 3d, or a toggle control will need some gradients in it to make it look more then a box in a box. Heck even putting a shadow under the active window to help it stand out.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It was lemmings with the 'paws' button iirc.
The game Lemmings had something like the footprints you describe to pause the game.
The "paws" icon is from Lemmings. I could imagine it being in other games too, though.
In HCI the technical term for this is an affordance
Lemmings is the game you're think of.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
The article doesn't say that realism is the only relevant factor.
Really. That was a very nice article that made me think about some things I've never really considered.
I work in the field of design (mostly designing computer-based training) and can tell you that your sentiment is more common than not. Most people never think of design or how it impacts their daily lives.
Because of this, I always suggest two books: The Design of Every Day Things and The Non-Designer's Design Book.
Once you read these two books, you'll never look at things the same way again. You'll start noticing poorly designed things EVERYWHERE and wonder why it wasn't made better. You'll even formulate your own ways of making it better, which in turn (generally speaking) makes your own work better.
Jef Raskin rightfully pointed out that descriptive text beats icons on any day.
Not quite. Cognition depends on the learner's preference. Text beats icons any day for people who's cognition works that way.
However, if I was from Japan, I wouldn't have any clue what any of these buttons mean. I'd probably get so fed up with it I'd request a Japanese version of Slashdot.
Slashdot Japan. So far as I can tell , it's a different set of articles.
When Microsoft has its own set of hieroglyphics, and Apple has theirs, and Adobe has theirs, and each OSS has its own language--which is similar to some existing commercial language to leverage user experience, but different enough to avoid getting sued--then the issue is not how well these languages are designed.
The issue is, why should the user need to learn a new language for each application?
Because, as you mention they can get sued. Anyone can trademark and copyright even a 16*16 monochrome bitmap icon. It is absurd that this can be true. There are words in the English language that need more bits than that just to spell correctly! Yet these icons have become part of our language. As a result software developers are scared to use existing icons because they might get sued. This is one reason why photographic quality icons have become more popular (in addition to computer graphics improving over the years), it is easier to prove a photographic image is unique.
I have seen people blatantly copy icons out of Windows and Mac for various projects because these symbols are what they are used to, and a slightly different icon may not mean the same thing. But it puts them at legal risk and then, sadly, others wind up having to make a big deal about replacing these icons with something different and possibly less recognizable to the users.