Defaulting to "Icons on Buttons"

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Friday, 2. September 2005 18:29, Stephan Binner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> some discussion showed that people say this setting is not turned on by
> default only for now historic reasons. Opinions on turning it on in 3.5?

I can only agree that it is much easier to recognize buttons with icons. Icons 
on buttons - no matter how small - at least give us the chance to color code 
an action, so even gnome users who usually have their OK/Cancel buttons 
swapped won't press the wrong one so easily. 
It is up to the artists to design icons that don't look like they have been 
imported from teletubby land.

Regarding menus without icons - I hope this was a joke. The menus items are 
not only faster to recognize (just guessing from my own experience - anyone 
disagrees with this?), they also give a very good hint how the corresponding 
toolbar icon looks like. And this is important, since it helps users learn 
more efficient ways of using a function.

With that in mind it might be worth considering putting an icon only in front 
of menu items which have a corresponding toolbar button. An icon in front of 
a menu item would then (and only then) be a strong hint that the same 
function can be called with the menu bar. It is similar in purpose to the 
keyboard shortcuts displayed behind menu items. Maybe only those icons should 
be shown in the menu which actually appear on the screen, not sure about 
that.
For buttons the policy could be to use icons only for actions which appear in 
several places. That's when the icons really make sense, because you don't 
have to interpret the icon then, but only associate it with some action. If 
the icon doesn't make it considerably easier to recognize the button, then it 
is indeed only clutter and no icon should be used. 

I'm also not sure what is worse from an artist's point of view: Menus with 
icons all over or menus with just a few icons here and there. But at least it 
might reduce the number of icons a little bit - in case this is the real 
problem.

Fred
-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net