Re: Clipboard

On Monday 05 August 2002 09:31, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> This isn't in the interest of *usability* at all, because most of us on
> this list agree that the traditional scissors/two sheets of
> paper/clipboard with paper icons are bad choices for icons. Their
> meaning must be learnt, and isn't obvious.
>
> The same is true for almost all icons. I'm looking at the toolbar in
> Kmail, and the only one which is intuitive is the printer icon.

I'd go a step further and say that the printer icon is only intuitive if it 
looks like YOUR printer.

> I think what you mean is that in the sole interest of *consistancy*,
> you would have a problem with changed cut/copy/paste icons.
>
> I think it is important to realise that consistancy only goes so far.
> Icons are not identical from OS to OS, or from application to
> application, or even between two versions of the same application. What
> is important is the over-all consistancy, not getting bogged down into
> exact pixel-to-pixel correspondence.
>
> The rule "consistancy is good" has a hidden assumption: it assumes that
> the interface is good in the first place. A bad GUI doesn't
> automatically become good just because it is consistant.

LOL.. it just becomes consistently bad.

> This is a good point. But text labels and tooltips exist because icon
> buttons are a bad user interface. This is not suprising, they were
> popularised by Microsoft in Office.

..

> I do have a point in this little bit of history. Toolbars are here to
> stay. I use them myself, even though they are less efficient, because
> they look cool, and they aren't so terribly inefficient. But changing
> the icon in a toolbar isn't a critical change like changing "Open" to
> "Read file", or rearranging the Edit menu. Its a comparitively minor
> difference, but one that is potentially much more efficient than the
> traditional icons.

Here's another bit of history... the clipboard icon wasn't the first or only 
icon used for paste, and it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense in the 
first place. Using a clipboard only makes sense if you know what the computer 
is doing behind the scenes. The first icon I recall used for this was in GEM, 
and was a jar of paste (glue). The metaphor is, after all, cut and paste, 
reminiscent of what you actually had to do when publishing. Unlike the 
clipboard, the jar of paste represented what the USER wanted done, rather 
than what the COMPUTER was doing. It took me all of a fraction of a second to 
become acclimated to the new, inferior Microsoft icon. The point of this 
story is, don't stress over this, it sucks anyway. Microsoft took a "cut and 
paste" metaphor, mixed it with a "clipboard" metaphor, and now the metaphor 
needs repairing. It SHOULD be changed for consistency, but importantly, to 
stop users from going, "huh?"

-- 
Dave Leigh, Consulting Systems Analyst
Cratchit.org
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I'm defending her honor, which is more than she ever did.