2009/9/16 Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
The problems you suggest are, in my opinion, examples
of poor usage of
icons, rather than problems inherent in icon use.
Absolutely agree. I'm personally responsible for some of the most
egregious icons in MediaWiki (namely some of the default toolbar
icons), which as we've found in our usability study, were utterly
confusing to users and didn't help them find key functions. There are
well-established visual metaphors for many concepts in MediaWiki, and
then there are things which are a lot harder to illustrate, where we
may do better without visuals.
Some good discussion about good/bad icons here:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion_Icons
Some relevant discussion from another context:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/icons.html.en
I think the Apple HIG have a lot of icon-related guidelines as well,
but can't download the 27MB PDF right now to check :-)
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExperience/Concept…
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate