Oxygen usability icon survey
The nice guys at OpenUsability have prepared a fantastic icon survey.
This survey will help KDE’s usability experts to point us which icons we should change or improve and which are already good. Thanks very much o everybody which will enter the survey.
PS: it doesn’t take very long, and there are no hard questions.
PPS: For the fews that haven’t seen the link to the survey here you go again :)
[…] @ 17:03 Posted by felipe in Ergonomia, Comunità, News e altre Sciccherie, Oxygen, KDE4, Estetica. trackback Non sono del tutto sicuro che invitare tutti a rispondere a sondaggi del genere sia la manierapiù sensata per arrivare a conclusioni degne… ma faccio da eco a David Vignoni e vi invito a compilare l’Icon Survey su OpenUsability.org […]
What a fun survey! I want more of these. :)
And I hope the Oxygon developer realise that navigation arrow icons should be arrows, not circles (!) with arrows inside them. Simple rule: Icons that would be comprehensible even if they were made into silhouettes work better.
There is no way to freely express our thought! For example, for quite a few questions like (7, 9, 21 and the questions about the docs), I did not found any convicing answer.
As there is no “none” choice, and no free text zone, I had no way to express that!
Questions look quite obvious for a computer geek; I wonder how a computer-illiterate would respond to some of those. In my opinion the spreadsheet doc looks too close to a plain-text file, for instance.
Bye :)
Most of the icons are greate BUT : the icons in the survey are much too small and I could hardly guess what some of them were meaning (for example to select icons representing mimetypes).
However, you and the team have done an impressive work !
I took the survey and must say that I had a really hard time answering the “which icons are text documents / tables / …” questions because the contrast of my notebook TFT is insufficient to really show anything distinguishable in the icons at that size.
It would be nice if the survery ended with a ‘comments’ textbox for feedback. I found some of the questions on this survey to be unanswerable. As someone pointed out before a ‘None’ choice would help some of the questions. in general i don’t think my answers are going to be useful b/c some questions i had to pick an icon when i didn’t see a suitable icon for the task.
Just that it doesn’t work. Clicking the next button on the first form results in nothing.
Not the fairest survey…
for a KDE day-by-day user there were some questions with obvious answers, on the other hand these would not be the same for a newbie, a good example would be the IM question, there is the kopete icon I’ve spotted as soon as the page loaded, but IMO that icon does not make sense for someone who have not seen it before…
Interesting survey. While I spend 50 hours a week at a computer running KDE, some of the questions still threw me.
I must say however that Q11 does not really seemed to be aimed at usability. “Which button takes you back?” with three left facing arrows and something completely different… With every web browser (that I know of) representing moving to the previous page in history as a left arrow, the question is really “Which arrow do you like more?”
Having said that, I hope that the answers to all the other questions (and even is to which arrow is liked more ;) helps improve the already great icon set. :)
As per earlier comments, there was a lack of essay boxes in the survey. I certainly made quite a few notes about the questions asked. Is there somewhere I can post them? ( Please mention this in another blog posting if so - I’m sure other readers would also like to add their views ).
Thanks guys to partecipate.
I’ve sent an email to OpenUsability folks to get some feedback from comments posted here.
Hi David,
Those mimetype icons are really hard to distinguish!
Also, those used to logout, switch user and power off are so close that can be confusing, they should not have the same color!
Hi,
Nice survey. I like the way it was written - very clean and nice looking.
I would add the comments section to the survey. It would be nice to hear what people have to say about the icons. And maybe in the selection of the appropriate icon - non-of-the-above as a choice.
For example - I don’t like the shutdown, lock & login as different user icons. The shutdown icon is standard and that is good. But I don’t understand the look of the lock icon. It would be much better to have a padlock-looking icon instead. At least, that’s what I think. And the icon to “login as different user” looks more like “reboot” icon to me.
Anyway, keep up the good work. We are all eager to see Oxygen in the brand new KDE4 :)
Brcha
-if cookies are disabled the survey doesn’t work. But it doesn’t tell you that, it lets you fill out the first page of the survey and then fails silently.
-No feedback box at the end of the survey.
Conclusion: F (the first point alone means a failing grade)
P.S.: The shutdown icon is pretty standard, but if I hadn’t known that one of the remaining two had to be lock screen and the other logout, I’d never have guessed their meaning.
The logout icon arrows are too stylized and imho shouldn’t arch along the edge of the icon.
And I really don’t know what the lock screen icon wants to represent. imho the padlock icon worked fine.
asdf:
Thanks about letting me know about the cookie thing - we weren’t aware of that. Must be a bug with the survey software we are using. I’ll look into it.
The feedback box suggestion is noted.
Tina
I have some specific feedback for the questions and as there was no contact I try to post it at least here (feel free to ask on the mail):
8. No icon clearly resembles CD Burning
12. I would expect big magnifying glass
14. Does say if the list is with icons, supposing it’s not
15. No icon looks clearly like a spreadsheet (there are few close, but look like text)
16. Utensils has a completely unclear icon
17. See 15
19. No real an email icon, closest one is the letter, but not really obvious
22. None, can’t find any suitable icon
24. None, can’t find any suitable icon
The survey really needs a “general comments” at the end! I’ll say my peace here.
What the heck with the Logout/Shutdown/Switch User buttons???!!!! It took me 15 seconds to make up my mind, because they are all such bad choices! First, they should be different colors. 2nd, Lock Screen (see, I’d already forgotten which ones were shown - I said Logout earlier instead of lock screen…) Lock Screen should show a “Lock”. Switch User should show a “User”. Shutdown should probably show a light switch, if we want to remain “intuitive”. (I really like the idea of using a light switch for “Off” now that I’ve thought of it. I hope somebody reads this!)
Also, I had trouble distinguishing between Documents and Spreadsheets. (and Plain Text, which wasn’t a choice, but I thought some of the icons could represent it.)
I put the single wrench for Configure rather than the traditional hammer and wrench, because hammers are generally used to build things (perhaps a good choice for Compile?) while wrenches are distinctly a tighten/tweak performance sort of thing.
None of the Web Browser icons were really compelling. I liked a lot of the other icons though: the 2nd CD Burning icon (the one with the flame at the bottom), the compose mail, attachments, pretty much all the email icons, the Tiles/Details/Icons views were great! Didn’t care for the binoculars that well, but generally think Oxygen will look very nice. Go KDE!
I agree with the above:
- Text and Spreadsheet documents are hard to distinguish
- Lock / Switch User Icon are not very intuitive, the current KDE3 ones are much better (for example red color for shutdown button)
A lot of the icons were nice, but here are my concerns:
1) None of the file icons really seemed to fit as a “spreadsheet”. The icon I chose was what I thought looked closet to a spreadsheet (but could also have been a plaintext file).
2) None of the options for the IM app really suggest instant messaging to me. I chose the kopete icon only because I’m used to it.
3) Same for the web browser.
3) The shutdown-related icons are just horrible. None of them (with the possible exception of the ( | ) icon, which I chose as shutdown) clearly demonstrated their purpose
Okay, decided to add my comments here:
Q.7 - The position of the button to open a list of all applications is a more important indicator to me than the icon used. I expect ( based on experience with Windows, KDE and Gnome ) for the icon to be in one of the screen’s corners. In the case of Windows, the bottom-left corner. I voted for the KDE icon purely because I prefer it aesthetically.
Q.8 (CD Burning) The first three icons clearly have nothing to do with CDs. The last two are clearly meant as images for a CD burning program. Unfortunately the 4th icon ( red CD with flames on ) does not resemble a CD closely because of the 3D raised border. The fifth icon ( CD with flames underneath ) is probably the best, but it is hard to make out the outline of the CD against a white background.
Q.10 (Web Browsing Icon) I picked blue globe with no extras around the edge. I am really not keen on the gear teeth around the Konqueror icon. I would prefer a larger globe, perhaps with elements of the main KDE icon in the middle.
Q.11 I would like to see distinct colors for the Back/Forwards arrows compared to the rest of the icons which are normally positioned next to them in web browsing applications. Green is often used as a symbolic color for going to places. It is easier to pick out an icon like this than the current Konqueror defaults which have six icons of identical color in the main toolbar.
Q.15. It is difficult to make out the cells in the spreadsheet icon at the small size presented.
Q.17 As per Q.15, it is difficult to identify the file-type icons at such a small size. Perhaps better use of colour would help.
Icons are too small and blurry even wearing glasses (that I do not use most of the time). Try them with xmag (cheater! ;-) and you realize they are close to meaningless icon gathers.
I’m not sure how useful such a survey could be when icons are so small, most of the time smaller than in any real world use (besides in some toolbars). I wasn’t able to chose any spreadsheet icon, and was doubtful chosing the archive icon.
Your work is beautiful, but photorealism is not helpful at that scale, I guess some enhance filters could be useful if possible (I neither know if icons are meant always to be svg-rendered on the fly, and if such filtering facilities are available in on the fly rendering).
[…] (via David) […]
11. Icons 2,3,4 are all arrows pointing back. Non-KDE users don’t know which icon KDE uses in it’s various web-browsers. (Unless of course you wanted ppl to pick the ‘best’ back button?)
15, 16. Mime types icons really don’t have enough contrast, they all look washed out. Even with good eyesight I needed to squint (CRT) to differentiate the icons… And I still selected the document icon (I think) for the spreadsheet icon.
Yup, other’s have mentioned the need for an “I don’t know” option with a text entry for the user to explain the problem.
For instance on the CD burning question I would have picked “I don’t know” and explained “None of the icons really look like a CD, or CD Burning ‘thingy’”
Otherwise, a good survey.
Your MySQL server looks like it’s about to choke… I keep getting WordPress database errors trying to browse the site..
[…] xmen lengends OpenUsability.org has prepared an icon survey about Oxygen icons. Participating will help designers to find usability issues with the icon design development. xmen official siteread more | digg story […]
to lock the computer there should be an icon with a lock on it
and not (-). icouldnt find an icon for spreadsheet app.
I’m really sorry, but most of the time the icons DID NOT FIT ALL, at least in my understanding. Apart from the already used KDE-icons there were no good alternatives. This concerns especially the file icons which I found really unconvincing.
Please reconsider using such icons for the new KDE.
i found this survey quite….hmmm….not soo good….
- all these “which icon is a text/spreadsheet/blabla”-questions i couldnt answer cause i wasn’t able to see anything - these icons are just to small (on a 1280×1024 19” CRT)
- i often had to make a “bad” choice in that way that i wasn’t able to identify the “right” icon on a first look (as it should be IMHO), only after a careful inspection of all icons
- i found these logoff/…-icons just….XXX why three icons, which look nearly the same? horror…..
well, just my 2cent….