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."

Comments

Confusing icon practices

[suso]

Just yesterday, I was commenting on twitter about how the new icon sets for youtube videos are rather confusing. It took a bit of staring to figure out what these icons do. Nobody was able to guess the right answer. C_64 had the funniest answer though by saying "You can only go 8 bits forward or 8 bits to the left ?"

Re:Confusing icon practices

[Speare]

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."

Re:Confusing icon practices

[Foolicious]

many people are too timid to press anything they don't already understand

Given my experience in IT in corporate America, I would say that this is not only not the case, but REALLY not the case.

Re:Confusing icon practices

[rantingkitten]

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."

It depends where you want to draw the line.

[je ne sais quoi]

If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.

What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.

many words

[Odinlake]

My, that was many words to say one thing over and over and over again. Pretty pictures though.

Re:many words

[StripedCow]

Redundancy turns precious information to noise.

Funny thing is, that was exactly what the article was all about!