On Friday, 9 בFebruary 2007 23:55, Nadav Har'El wrote: > Like Chinese idiograms, if you have a 100 different actions in a toolbar you > need to remember the 100 different pictures for them; These pictures are > rarely self-explanatory, and when you need a specific one it takes you a > long time to find the correct one. > ... > When Windows is installed, and there are just 5 icons there, it may > (almost) make sense.
I think you've hit the point. There were plenty of research (don't have a handy reference) that an average human (what's that?) can easily recognize 5-7 symbols in a flash. E.g: if you show someone a slide for a split second she would easily remember 5-7 objects on the slide. So icons are *excellent* for a small groups of objects, while representing large group of objects as icons just creates a lot of visual noise where only few icons which are very familiar and have a good contrast can stand-out (Firfox, PDF, etc.) Also, taking your other observation about ideographic vs. alphabetic languages. If the number of icons is far less then the number of letters in a typical alphabetic language (say 10 instead of 24), than the icons are better (just like a single letter word are easier to spot than multi-letter words). -- Oron Peled Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron ICQ UIN: 16527398 But it does move! -- Galileo Galilei ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
