Take a look at this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/rss.aspx
It’s interesting reading about the new Office-interface.

Markus

> You’re right that the icons are only useful
> once you know what actions they allow you to
> perform, but once you know the action you’re
> looking for, they can let you find the
> button more quickly. In a cursory web
> search I was not able to find the few
> pictures I was thinking about to illustrate
> this, but think about how the visual system
> executes search tasks–if all the items
> you’re searching THROUGH are visually very
> similar to the item you are searching FOR,
> then it degenerates into a serial search.
> If they are more distinct, then the visual
> system can find things using other
> techniques. Contrast searching for an F
> amidst lots of E’s, L’s, T’s and H’s with
> searching for an O amidst X’s, I’s, and E’s
> and S’s.

I think the problem is that the fact that you find the O amid the Xs easily relies on not just the fact that the O looks different from the Xs, but that most of the visual field looks the same (it’s all Xs). So if we make 99% of our icons mostly indistinguishable, then the remaining 1% will really stand out. Alternatively, if we had 1/100th of the icons we have, they’d probably stand out more.

Reading your comments Dale made me think about how I find stuff among the smattering of icons on my desktop. I think it is a linear search. I’ve gotten used to certain ones being in certain areas, so that speeds up the search, but basically I get close and then look around. Whenever I have to change my laptop resolution to use a projector (and it forcably moves icons to fit the new size), I’m screwed up for a couple of days because I never take the time to put them back in the same location. So, I linearly search them for a while until my internal map gets built again.

A bunch of you guys are Mac people right? In days of yore when I had a Mac I remember there being a set of like 8 “labels” (essentially colors) that you could give to things. The effect was, if you gave some file the pink label, the icon would become pinker than before (these labels all had important sounding names like “hot” or “essential”). At the time, I never saw a use for this feature. Now, I wonder if you could use it to take advantage of people’s color-based pre-attention and then do something linear. Of course, this again relies on most icons having the same color and just a few standouts.

Glenn

You claim that what you are complaining about in http://paco.to/blog/visio.png is the fact that the (seemingly arbitrary) icons are useless. You are actually complaining, though, that there are too many icons, and therefore it’s hard to find the one you want. Assume that each icon is replaced by a word taking up no more space (unlikely)–it would be just as jumbled, but it would now be even harder to find the action you are looking for–now you need to read each word in order on order to find the appropriate action–there’s no way to search through them except by a linear pass.

You’re right that the icons are only useful once you know what actions they allow you to perform, but once you know the action you’re looking for, they can let you find the button more quickly. In a cursory web search I was not able to find the few pictures I was thinking about to illustrate this, but think about how the visual system executes search tasks–if all the items you’re searching THROUGH are visually very similar to the item you are searching FOR, then it degenerates into a serial search. If they are more distinct, then the visual system can find things using other techniques. Contrast searching for an F amidst lots of E’s, L’s, T’s and H’s with searching for an O amidst X’s, I’s, and E’s and S’s.

I agree that icons not well tied into an app’s help system are bad. I agree that visual clutter is bad (I tend to get rid of practically all “toolbars” and just use the menus (with keyboard shortcuts when I know them)). I don’t agree that all icons present less information/pixel in a less searchable manner. I think they can be more precise than the text that can be presented in the same amount of space, and I think that if they are well enough designed they can be searched through efficiently utilizing the strengths of the human user’s visual system. For example, just because there exist colorblind people doesn’t mean color should not be used to make tasks easier for those who can see color.

-Dale

- As a partially color-blind person, I really don’t like OS X’s use of colored buttons. I figure I’d have to memorize the positions.

- It occurs to me that your tirade may have similarities with tirades on the use of “skins” that seems to be popular with apps nowadays. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16564.html

- While I agree that icons are tough on new users, I think that in the end we do want them. For example, the “and” (wide “D”) and “or” (arrowhead) symbols from digital logic design are second nature to me now, and actually save me time and space.

- Some of your objections are objections with the particular implementation of icons, not icons per se:
– Icon overload: Office now hides less frequently used icons
– Lack of dictionary-style help and documentation: There’s no reason you can’t do that with the mouseover text for icons.
– Keyboard-based navigation: Could be implemented for icons as well

- Some apps already support parts of your rant!:
– Just about any app will let you get rid of the toolbars
– IE lets you choose text, icons with text, or just icons.
– In Office, you can get text buttons if you right click on a button, select customize, then while the customize dialog is open, right click on the button again and select “text only”
– Most apps have keyboard shortcuts for people who can’t use a mouse well. Alt-f, x is my favorite way to end an app.

David

P.S. For a more serious rant, we should ask why the Navy is using Windows NT for submarines, why lasers for eye surgery are controlled by Windows 95, and why the DoD is ready to move to web-based services even though there are still unsolved problems of integrity, dependability, security, etc.

I’m one of what I believe is a dying breed – a user who actually takes the time to learn keyboard shortcuts so that I don’t have to lift my hand to use the mouse. Even with a trackpoint, I prefer using keys (Dave and Paco both alluded to this as well). Therefore, icons distract me less than they distract others.

- Traditional media now seem to have absorbed interfaces from Computer Science, never mind that the former are far less interactive. Anyone who has seen CNN Headline News recently will recognise that the screen now looks like a browser, complete with unnecessary icons squatting over precious real estate. I shudder to imagine when newspapers convert their insert-adverts to pop-ups.

- Recommending the use of text does not translate to presenting a bland CLI. Judicious use of text in GUIs/WUIs may be unglamorous but will be rewarded by users who get their work done faster.

- Non-obvious keyboard shortcuts are worse than icons. MicroSoft products are especially guilty of these. Even the superbly-useful PowerPoint has notorious bloopers (Alt-e-e for replace? Alt-d-v or Alt-v-w for viewing a presentation?) FrameMaker, IMO, does a very good job of keyboard shortcuts (Esc-f-o for file open, Esc-g-a for graphics align and so on).

- I think icon usage will increase simply because of the increasing trend to dumb things down. I’m not against making things _simple_, but I dislike _dumbing down_. Again, MS is most guilty of this. They could have made using templates simpler, but no, that would mean acknowledging decades of others’ work in typesetting. Instead they have the dumb B icon, which nullifies any attempt to make well-formed documents.

- I don’t think icons encourage experimentation. Or if they do, the potential for shooting yourself in the foot is extremely large. I like to think of myself as a FrameMaker power-user and I got that way simply because their menus are well-organised, with like actions in proximate menus. Not so with Word, which has irritated me with poorly-designed menus and proliferate icons.

- I sure hope nuclear power plants don’t have wordless icons. I’d hate to think there’s a Homer-Simpson-esque guys saying “I wonder what the button with the triangles does…”. If we don’t trust icons alone in nuclear plants, we shouldn’t trust them alone in day-to-day software as well. Day-to-day software may not directly maim and kill, but it can cost a lot in carpal tunnels, punched-out monitors and general self-tonsure.

Nuts

The other icon thing that bugged me the other day is I downloaded a new web browser and I was looking for an icon to add to my toolbar that would suggest to me “click here for web browser” and out of like 5000 icons none of them were any good. I finally picked one that looks like a planet or something, it seemed as good as any.

But to argue slightly with your main point, I think icons have two main benefits. They look pretty, which is something that people like (especially since the average home user might not get a lot more than this out of their computer) and they also give you some idea of how many different things you could do if you were to be so bold as to move the mouse somewhere and click. They encourage experimentation: “Aha! Clicking the funny “I” makes my text all slanty!” In stark contrast the unix “$” prompt is hardly encouraging to the novice. “WTF do I do now?” is the logical response to the dollar sign, whereas any doof can probably create a pretty picture using Mac Draw or whatever by finding an icon shaped like a triangle, clicking it, creating a triangle, and so on.

When you say “Words have meaning that is already well-defined.” I’m sure you mean words like awk, cpio, dd, df, ed, ex, igawk, mknod, ps, rm, sed, sh, su, tar, vi, and zcat . There are dozens of commands available on my Linux box that I don’t know what they do, and, moreover, can’t even make a plausible guess. So I’m not sure that words are the entire answer here.

You know Paco, it probably wouldn’t be too hard for you to write a patch or plugin or whatever for Gnome or KDE that eradicates all icons, replacing them with words. If you do this I promise to download it and try it out.

John