[kde-artists] Bad Studies Are Worse: About the Recent Results on Detail in Icon Design

Dear Icon Designers, Usability People and Survey Makers,

I am cross-posting a response I left on the blog entry "More is worse: 
About Detail in Icons" posted by Björn Balazs on User Promt and 
aggregated on Planet KDE. It can be found here: http://user-prompt.com/more-is-worse-about-detail-in-icons/

I do not intend to deride the work that has 
gone into this study, but I fear that the community may be misled by the results of a highly flawed methodology. Mind that I am not a statistician, but I know enough about this topic 
that I can spot some major flaws in no-time. Please find a part of the text (with less typos) below.


"""

This
study is so flawed  that the value of its results is nonexistent. Taking it seriously may even be harmful.


First of all, the distinction between low-detail 
and high-detail icons is highly inconsistent. Second, those in the first category point to rather well-known, well-entrenched and often-used 
actions the icons of which many will easily recognize, while the latter are less often 
used. Third, the latter category also includes icons such as the 
"auto-spellcheck" and the "spelling and grammar" icons that are very 
close to one another both in meaning and in iconic representation. Thus, an allegedly low-detail icons like "save" will score higher than either of the spell-related icons due to the inherent ambiguity. Concluding 
that this has to do with the level of detail (which in my opinion is very similar) is not the way to go.

Instead,
 you would need two sets of icons that represent the same actions, one 
with more and one with less detail. Both icon sets would have to be 
equally known or unknown to your audience. A statistician might tell you more.

I do appreciate your work, but please 
don't encourage the F/OSS community to invest resources into design that
 are misdirected based on well-meaning but simply wrongly executed 
studies.

Thank you.
"""

All the best,

mutlu

______________________________________________________________________________
[email protected] |  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-artists