http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/design-review-ep-2/

Designing for discoverability rather than usability?

I mean, the icon can change can’t it? And if things were design for the discoverability to usability transition wouldn’t that be safe?

This is not quite a good example, but sort of makes my point: why doesn’t say Word actually start for the first few times with some kind of key beneath the tool bar that has “floppy=save, folder=open folder” kind of instructions. And after a few opens of Word or a few uses of the icons, you can expect your users to have memory of the icons, and you hide away the key.

I love words too. But I’m always on the fence. Should the interface really be primarily words or should they be icons and words with words disappearing after successful discovery of what icons mean?

@Stuart: The original research that got people started with icons was that icons are more quickly found than text for between 8-12 icons that are visually highly distinct, placed randomly.

@Jakub, @Andreas: :)

@Yu-chung: An interest thought. The live preview isn’t around because I haven’t had much time to work on the backend of my blog.

Language (both verbal and visual) is littered with exactly this kind of process — where an apt neologism transforms into a disconnected symbol we understand instinctively. I doubt many people would know or worry about the etymology of “Hello”. In fact, much of English is built on languages that most English-speakers aren’t even familiar with.

It would be a shame to lose these living fossils with an interesting back-story to time-proof but often bland and abstract symbolism. “Back” and “Forward” are universal, but they certainly aren’t interesting.

Some time later, looking at all those even shinier icons on the Mac, I was wondering: could the continuation of this trend lead to some sort of “prototypical” icons do not necessarily communicate their meaning through an unambiguous real-world reference but end up ‘overriding’ it.

Their visual mark become the primary association of the idea they intended to represent, referring to nothing but itself in the end, like a simulacrum in the sense of Jean Baudrillard’s hyperrealism.

You know, sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use it often enough and it will become what it should embody.

Or like any word whose meaning has been transformed over the centuries so that current usage has nothing to do with the original reference, but we learn their meaning per definition, by brute force.

Btw, something off-topic. Why isn’t the nifty live comment preview you have on the Humanized blog here?

a guy from Mainz, Germany, is creating PICOL, a Pictorial Communication Language. Not exactly what Ubiquity is all about, but definitly worth to seize. In his post “What the hack is a floppy disk?” (http://blog.picol.org/what-the-heck-is-a-floppy-disk/) he is looking for an alternative to the good old floppy disk. Also worth to see is thesis, a movie about the history of the internet (http://blog.picol.org/history-internet/).

Greetz from the river Rhine
Sascha