[584] in Athena User Interface
Re: Mail icon
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Jan 5 22:46:38 2001
Message-Id: <200101060346.WAA01403@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 05 Jan 2001 21:40:30 EST."
<200101060240.VAA43511@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001 22:46:31 -0500
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> (The graphic artists at the Publishing Services Bureau are also at
> our disposal.)
Have they produced any icons to date (or been asked to)? I had though
the flagspool icon came from them, but apparently it didn't.
> The recommendations from testing on icons are available at:
> http://web.mit.edu/is/usability/aui/icons/auicons.html
I read this before, but now that I read it again, I have some
criticisms of this page and the process which led to it:
* The process gave highly distinguished status to the first
icon presented to the users for each task. In the case of
the terminal icon, that was xterm-red-X.
* The page does not say precisely how the "Results" section
was generated for icons other than the first one presented.
* Did testers 1, 2, 3, and 5 really report that they
understood what the xterm-red-x icon meant but not the
xterm-gray-x icon? This result seems totally implausible.
I also have trouble believing that four out of six testers
would really be able to decipher the "XTerm Perspective"
icon without outside knowledge that it was an xterm
launcher; it could as easily be a word processor or text
editor.
* The four candidate choices of xterm icon were questionable
at best. Two of the five panels used the
obviously-unsuitable "upper-left corner of a window" icons,
and there was no "terminal without an X" icon.
* For launchers other than the xterm icon, the same icon
(sometimes with a different caption, sometimes not) was
presented in all five panels. For nautilus (do we really
need a launcher for this?) and evolution, the icons turned
out to be completely inappropriate.
As a result, this web page provides absolutely zero objective insight
into what the panel icons should be, although it provides some insight
into what they shouldn't be. I'm sorry to be so critical, but it's
true. (Unfortunately, you seem to have convinced Bill that usability
testing has shown xterm-red-X to be a superior choice for a launcher
for gnome-terminal, when there is no particular justification of that
choice besides some meaningless numbers.)
