Iconitis

[Walter Bright]

In article <28684 at ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jas at ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland) writes:
>That's tantalizing.  Would you be willing to elaborate a little on what
>you think makes a good graphical interface, what's a good example and
>why, and what's wrong with the IBM PC keyboard and Macintosh icons?

What's wrong with icons is not necessarily icons, but what I've called
"iconitis". This is the religious fervor by which an icon is invented
for every command, because icons are 'better'. For example, I once attended
a seminar put on by a person badly afflicted with this disease. He passed
around a char with about 50 icons in it (that were all in use by various
mac programs) and asked programmers (who were unfamiliar with the mac)
what they meant. Very few were consistently identified.

One was an icon for 'printer'. Nobody figured that one out till they were
told that that was supposed to be a picture of a printer. I've also seen
a lot of effort expended to come up with an icon for 'Help'. Those people
got mad when I suggested the string 'Help' would do nicely.

Another reason that excessive icons are trouble is the tendency to copyright
the %^&* things. Walla, every program has a different set of icons that
mean the same thing. Talk about counterproductive.

The end result of iconitis is Chinese. Chinese has an icon for every word
and concept, and the result is, well, have you ever tried to learn it?

English is an excellent vehicle for describing abstract things, or things
which cannot be easilly represented as a 16*16 bitmap. Things such as
'Help', 'Print', 'Save', 'Exit', 'Delete', etc. What's wrong with these,
and I defy anyone to come up with an icon for these that would be correctly
identified by more than 50% of the computer users you present it to.

Don't misunderstand me, icons have their place. The arrows on the ends
of scroll bars are an ideal example of correct use of icons. I don't know
anyone who misunderstood that.