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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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And that's about all that needs to be said here. RTFA and it's complete and makes infinitely good sense, so nothing to discuss about it.
Really. That was a very nice article that made me think about some things I've never really considered.
My, that was many words to say one thing over and over and over again. Pretty pictures though.
But regardless of age there are good and bad icons. Newer icons aren't better, and often they seem to be even more confusing than many old icons.
It's time to realize that a clean strict interface for the users is often better than all those flashy colors, gradients and animations that wastes time and productivity. Look into what users really do, not what you think the users should do with your software.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces. Instead, you want your interfaces to be "discoverable" and to build on other trained discoveries in a consistent way.
From that example of the new YouTube buttons, I agree they're bizarre. Pretty much any button that JUST shows an arrow is useless for discoverability. Does the arrow mean 'move' or 'grow' or 'next' or some other action? By "discover," we don't mean to literally experiment with invoking the button to see what it does-- many people are too timid to press anything they don't already understand. Instead, discovery involves finding that there IS a button that PROBABLY does what you already intend to do. For example, follow the mental conversation: "this window is too small, I want to make it bigger, there's got to be a button around here somewhere for making it bigger, oh aha! that one looks like a dark box getting bigger, so let me try that, yep, that's better."
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While this guy talks about realism, he's missing the point. If we didn't have each software designer creating its own visual language, then we wouldn't have the issue of how well that language is designed.
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?
You may say, well, if you put all your commands in English, then only English speakers can use your app. Fair enough. But if you put all your commands in some bespoke language spoken by no one, doesn't it follow then no one can use your app?
Designers, pick an existing language used by your target market. Is that real enough?
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?
But guess what -- nearly everyone who grew up with 70s stereos instantly knew how to use those programs. Without having sort of prior knowledge, would you know that the > icon meant 'play', or that >| meant 'next track'? No, you wouldn't. At least not instinctively. You need some sort of baseline experience to begin. For all those audio apps, a 'standard' stereo system was that baseline.
Early to the Mid 90's is when most computers were able to do at least 640x480x8bit this was a big deal, before we were stuck on 320x200 resolution for 8bits (if you were lucky, I was a 320x200 2bits CGA) But in short this is when computers now able to show photo realistic pictures. And many developers have long waited for the ability to make programs that look so much like the real thing, As the earlier systems required a lot of artistry to come up with a cartoonish icon at best. So it was really a large scale experiment on how realistic you can make your program... What happened over time was people realized that being to realistic wasn't helpful and overlaying a 3d Interface with 2d controls was counter productive
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My car's interior is the worst example of that. Thanks to the internationalization of the automobile industry (and having no set standards), every control in my car (and many others) is now identified by an icon instead of a label. And many of the icons make no sense whatsoever. So every time I get in a new rental car, I have to figure out whether I'm turning on the heater or the windshield wipers with this control, or what the mysterious smiley-face-looking button does. They build a $20000+ car and can't spring for a few lousy labels in the local language?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There's an important difference: layout familiarity.
Chances are anyone who uses a program enough to want to theme it is already familiar with all the control they will use. They've already associated "upper corner, second button from the left" with the "home" button. They can change the appearance of the button, because they don't rely on the visual representation for context anymore. (And if they did, there will be just a minor learning curve)
Plunking a new user in front of the themed version of the program (versus a "simplified UI" version) is different. They have to learn all the buttons from scratch, because they don't see the familiar, simple "home" button anymore. They'll just see the animated Steam-Blenching Blundurbuss-Widget.
I do wonder, though, if you took someone intimately familiar with (for example) steampunk, and dumped them in front of a steam-punk theme program, if they'd have an easier time learning than a simplified theme? After all, the underlying hypothesis here is that users will be less confused by easy-to-grok graphical representations. Cultural (or even sub-cultural) references might be easier to understand (at least for that culture)
UTF-8: There and Back Again
That would likely be the original Lemmings. Now there was a game that got some of its UI elements correct!
The hell with icons, let's just depict the actual thing the little dullards will do!
Want to kill them all? Hit the NUKE button.
Ahhh good times, good times...
Posting obviously for anonymous reasons.
It's called KISS. No, not the band, but KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID.
In other words, it's the Uncanny Valley in action.
> The taskbar can only be on the bottom or side. Yet, the Mac OSX interface is the standard that other GUIs try to meet.
That has more to do with hype and ignorance than anything else.
It's somewhat exclusive. You need to buy special hardware for it. So all you ever hear about
it are mostly the fanboy accounts. The way Macs are marketed tends to keep the casual tinkerers
away. Someone without a pro-Apple agenda is unlikely to use a Mac to any meaningful degree.
So it becomes something more mythical than real...
For some things, a giant photo realistic icon is just the thing.
The end user should ultimately be able to make that judgement.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces.
No there are lots of intuitive interfaces, there just aren't many (if any) "universal" interfaces. You can give me flack for it, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the Slashdot comment interface is very intuitive. I know the reply button starts a reply. The Cancel button cancels it. The option button lets me see various options. Very intuitive, I have not needed to press any of these buttons to know their respective meaning. That by definition makes it intuitive.
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.
So what it comes down to is trying to make something universally understood. Surprisingly enough, any country that has vehicular traffic uses Green for Go and Red for stop. Whether thats based on open standards or some psychological root, I don't know. So if you had an option that you could start or stop, putting the same image in green and the other in red would show which one starts it and which one stops it. Similarily, the symbols on every Media player for Play, Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward, Stop, and Record are also Universal across the planet. So it makes sense to put them on any application that plays media.
There are a handful of things like this out there. It's not impossible to create an intuitive computer interface. The tricky part is to make it universal across all demographics of people who will use it, especially if there is a language barrier. This is where icons with the help of tooltip popups can be great.
It's called "written language". Instead we get these asinine rebuses.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That guy is 100% right, but there isn't anything new, let alone newsworthy in that post.
As long as there continues to be bad design, there can never be enough articles like this one.
My experience is that people will click with wild abandon when they shouldn't, and be deathly afraid to do anything when there's no real harm involved.
These are the people who will install anything they damn well please, change important settings for absolutely no reason "because it seemed like a good idea", set passwords on things that don't need passwords and then forget them, forward phone A to phone B and phone B to phone A because "I wanted them both to ring if I got a call," and other general nonsense. They have no problem screwing around to their heart's content and breaking everything and never learning.
That same person will also submit endless tickets or place endless helpdesk calls because they were afraid to change a trivial setting that involves a single, labelled checkbox, because "I wasn't sure if that would mess anything up."
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Icons have a big advantage you don't mention: they don't need to be translated (in most cases).
I'm currently developing a program for mobile phones, and by using icons almost exclusively, I have almost-zero translation costs, and can sell it to a few billion non-English-speakers without worrying too much.
(as usual, there are exceptions -- some icons simply don't work outside their cultural context, but that's a problem that good icon-makers know they should avoid. For example, showing a stylized European medieval helmet to mean "history" would work wonders in Italy or France, but would result in problems with Chinese and African audiences; which is why most browsers use more universal time-related images like clocks)
-- Let's go Viridian.
I think a big reason this blog entry exists is precisely because good design ISN'T obvious, as evidenced by the amount of bad design we see every day.
I like your reasons for the existence of bad design. The over-zealous guy (I call them my Adobe Employees) that is always trying to make cutting edge stuff in our training that is so fancy that it: a) confuses the learners and b) cripples the computer's cpu cycles. I'd another designer type--the "doesn't matter" guy who just goes out and grabs a random crappy MS clipart object and slaps it on there because he's so concerned with the background code that he doesn't care about usability.
Icons are semantically shallow.
They have no inherent properties of extensibility or composability. A certain amount of design attention can productively go into icons, just as font design has an important role in readability. But to stop there is just about as smart as sticking with Roman numerals.
Icons, also, don't translate into speech. Who here has not at one time or another had to walk someone over the phone through a user interface by saying something like, "Okay, before you go ahead and click on the icon with the two little arrows going in a circle, you should first click on the one which looks like a little diskette. You see the popup window that just appeared? Oh, okay, that can happen too. The red icon with the X through it means that the operation isn't allowed right now. Now I need you to go to the top of the screen and click on another icon that looks like a little diskette. No, it means something different there."
Writing documentation around these sorts of interfaces is equally nasty. So people don't. Or if they do, it's so shallow as to be nearly useless. It typically provides a text equivalent for each icon, and not much else. For clarity of documentation, give me a CLI any day. Even better, any decent CLI can be wrapped in a scripting language which does support composability. So instead of telling you the fifteen steps required to do a task, I can give you a script that does the whole thing. I can parameterize it. And if circumstances warrant, I can attach that script to a button on a web page somewhere. Try doing any of that with a GUI.
It's really an enormous triumph of design to arrive at a successful user interface based purely on icons. The fact that it can be achieved sometimes doesn't imply that it will work most of the time.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
It’s a GUI. On a screen. Not a mechanical button from a 1980s VCR.
The only thing “realism“ does, is limit you, and create analogies that do not fit.
Besides: Who came up with the stupid idea of replacing everything with symbols, so that you have to guess what it means? The worst offenders are those that only offer on-hover text, or even no text at all. /” or “deltree /y c:\”, on their own desktop, then forget what it means, and click it.
I wish they would make a big icon, linking to “rm -rf
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.