[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Icon design

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 30 December 2013 19:12:52 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> On Monday 30 December 2013, 16:54:14 David Edmundson wrote:
> > Can we expand on "avoid using arrows".
> >
> >I have seen [  Next ->  ] in wizards which seems OK to me.
> 
> Arrows seems to the favorite symbol for designers. It can be used to
> indicate Next/Previous steps but is applied as well for many other,
> completely different functions, e.g. Undo/Redo, Load/Save, Find Next etc.
> One result of an extended icon test for LibreOffice was that spatial
> information should be used with care.
> 
> http://user-prompt.com/can-a-direction-in-time-be-displayed-by-spatial-signs

Arrows indeed are often problematic. In a usability test of an email app I 
just did they used left/right arrows for reply/forward, but most test users 
confused them with previous/next email.

It seems to me that there is a strong association between left/right arrows 
and previous/next (whether it's previous/ntext step in a wizard or 
previous/next item in a list). Therefore, they seem to work well for that, but 
not for anything else. And even if they mean previous/next, they seem to only 
work well if accompanied by text.

So maybe we could write "Use arrows only if they can easily be related to 
spacial features such as previous/next item in a list or up/down one level in 
a hierarchy (or if they indeed mean "move left/right/up/down"). Avoid using 
arrows metaphorically (such as for reply/forward or undo/redo)."?