Removing icons from KDE 4 Menus

[Florian Graessle]

seele at obso1337.org wrote:
> Greetings from planet usability:
> 
> it seems as if this decision is being determined based on what the
> developers would prefer and not what our target user base is.
> 
> my 2$USD cents:
> 
> icons in the menu are not a bad thing.  they facilitate faster locating of
> key items with icons which are familiar.  i see the problem with not
> having ALL the items with icons or TOO many icons, but they do more help
> than good.
> 
> you as developers may not see the use of icons or may even be annoyed by
> them because you have a different use model for the environment than the
> average user.  images, graphics, colors, anythign you want to call fluff,
> they all add the the experience.  the icons in the menus play an assitive
> role and they help users quickly find certain items.

A lot of people have asked about research results to support this, so
here goes:

William Horton in "The Icon Book" (Wiley) says: "Almost all research
comparing  the use of visual symbols and word labels has found that the
combination of the two works better than either alone."

Two actual research papers about this:

Edigo, C., and Patterson, J. (1988). Pictures and category labels as
navigational aids for catalog browsing. Human Factors in Computing
Systems: CHI '88 Conference Proceedings, 127-132:

They compared people's ability to navigate through a database using
either only icons, only text labels, or a combination of both and
discovered that people could reach their target fastest when icons and
text were combined.


Muter, P., and Mayson, C. (1986). The role of graphics in item selection
for menus. Behaviour and Information Technology, 5(1), 89-95:

They examined the role of graphics in the selection of items from a
menu. The study found that a text-graphics combination significantly
reduced the number of errors that people made when selecting the item
they wanted -- selection accuracy increased.