Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Michael Andrews

Michael Andrews — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:09:36 GMT

I’ll be brave and admit I don’t understand everything here—the prose is clear, but my brain is small.

My gut impression is that designers rely too much on icons. They seem difficult to distinguish the more graphically elaborate and three-dimensional they become. The greater the number of distinctions icons try to make, they less successful they convey these distinctions, especially when viewed in the M-channel.

Seems it is difficult to provide sufficient discrimination when there are numerous icons. I don’t have a sense of how many different unique low frequency icons are possible to display at once. Could one have 20 icons that would all have sufficiently unique frequencies so that users could tell each any pair of them apart?

Michael Andrews — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:05 GMT

Matt, thanks for your detailed response. You asked why 20 icons might be necessary. I agree for navigation purposes one could partition along the lines you suggest. But it is common to have many icons even on tool bars. I must have 25 on my browser, with just one add-in to the browser’s main navigation.

What is very common as well is the use of icons in rows of data, especially in enterprise applications. Think about icons in a list of emails, where you can delete or forward an item from the list. It saves space to show an icon only. But the number of icons is not limited to a small sub-set. I think SAP have over 200 icons available for use, but the distinctions between them are minute, and it must be a burden to learn what they represent if there are too many.

I agree with your point about the visual form of text presenting similar issues, but would speculate that the peripheral recognition of text is superior than for icons, simply because we are so familiar with letters and their combinations we can “fill-in” meaning more easily than with a idiosyncratic icon.

Michael Andrews — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:11 GMT

It’s great to see a discussion of enterprise software, which can lag the consumer world in many respects, and as a result, is viewed as a dismal corner of the web world.

I agree Web 2.0 and Ajax offer many possibilities. Larger enterprises are acutely aware they have a general problem with information/knowledge to becoming learned by people not directly connected with the project or activity generating that information. What is a challenge is measuring what are the specific cost impacts of the general problem. In my experience, enterprises are particularly reluctant to spend on general infrastructure projects that have across-the-board benefits but that are difficult to measure in relation to itemized profit and cost centers. The other challenge is overcoming legacy infrastructure. Enterprises often are configured around fairly rigid Java-based page architectures and standards, and IT staff can be reluctant to embrace new technologies such as Ajax or Ruby.