Laptop diary tool in REV - Glyphs

[Jeffrey Reynolds]

While a picture or icon can be worth a thousand words they can be  
just as hard or harder to find the correct image to represent a  
concept to everyone. Even w/in N American culture i find that  
creating icons for projects the most contencious and divergent point  
in projects, so much so i try and avoid them if i can since they end  
up costing a lot in time and anguish. Dont get me wrong, i love them,  
but with the non profit and education markets i work in the cost for  
simple icons can be a major ticket item! Its funny to look at the  
suggestions i get from folks to begin with then their comments on the  
design rounds -- many times they end up being 180 from where someone  
started (yes this happens in many parts of projects, but always  
happens with icons). they say it should look like x and you do  
something like x and they comment later why did you use x and not  
y... Its just that good icons/glyphs take a lot of work to get good.

one place small pictons really worked when everyone thought they  
wouldnt was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the Deep Link exhibit  
interface when i first did it 16 years ago. The aquarium thought we  
would have to use a set of text lists to organize and call up the 300  
odd video clips they had then. I too one mental picture of this and  
recoiled. These were the days of still only 16 colors in toolbook,  
but i went ahead and did video grabs on the mac (ironically i could  
show them in colorized HC on the mac, but the final version had to  
run on the PC) and did some fiddling to drop them to 16 colors. in  
the end i was able to come up with these little 16 color pictons that  
ended up working smashingly well. even though each piction had a two  
line (20 characters each label), the presenters could not take the  
time to read names, but the pictons ended up being a great visual  
represnetation of the clips after they practiced on the system for a  
while. the full color, larger pictons on the current system i find  
actually harder to glance at quickly and find what i want, even  
though they are clear for a first time user to see what they want.  
Since everything has to be pretty we had to keep it full color even  
though the cruder versions might have worked better for the expert  
system approach!

cheers,

Jeffrey Reynolds



On Jun 19, 2006, at 12:58 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> That's why we have tooltips and reference manuals...and some of us
> display on-screen contextual help at each step in a process.  I  
> suggest
> that once the user understands the meaning of an icon within a  
> specific
> application, she/he will recognize that icon in subsequent windows in
> the application more quickly than identifying a string of text.