Iconitis

[Robert J. Drabek]

In article <1930 at dataio.Data-IO.COM>, bright at Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
> 
> 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'.
> 
> 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.

"Help" is just fine as long as you read English.  I agree with Walter for
the most part, but there are a few people who would like to use icons in
a limited context.
 
> 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?

I can't let this go by.  It is now obvious that strings in English could
be misunderstood as well.  Note the author of the above is known by the
the string "Walter Bright"; with such a label we could be mislead as to
his intelligence.  :-) Come on.  Yes, I have tried to learn it (Chinese).
So have over a billion other people for a couple of thousand years.  And
they had no problem.  Their reaction, by the way, to learning
string-oriented languages is pretty negative.

The reading speed of native Chinese and native English literates is very
close.  From my observation, the Chinese system may even have a (very)
slight advantage.

And, one of the advantages put forward for iconic interfaces, that you
don't need to know the language of the programmer, is clearly evident in
the Chinese system.  You see, there are several Chinese languages
(Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fujian, ...) which are NOT mutually
understandable at the spoken interface.  But they all share the same
graphic interface.  So the Cantonese customer can not even ask about the
Mandarin waiter's child, but they can pull down the iconic menu and
order exactly the dishes they want.  Want to go to Czechoslovakia and
try that?

> 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.

I really agree that I am very comfortable with this, but probably
because I deal with these critters all the time.  But let's not be so
ethno (techno?) centric.  And I still like some icons; they're SO cute.
-- 
Robert J. Drabek
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721