[OT] "The Condescending UI" (was: Do we need Win95/98/Me support?)

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Mon Jan 23 02:22:47 PST 2012


"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:jfj38h$8n8$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 1/22/2012 10:30 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Hah! I just found the *perfect* article about this and other similar
>> matters:
>
> Hilarious!
>
> It reminds me of back in 1984 or 85 or so, a Mac evangelist came by the 
> company I worked for then (Data I/O) to evangelize the Mac. None of us in 
> the group had ever used or seen a Mac before, so we were GUI virgins.
>
> One of the first things he did was hand out a sheet of paper with a bunch 
> of icons on it. He proudly asked us what each of those icons signified. We 
> got about 10% of them right. He was crestfallen. One I remember looked 
> like a box of kleenex. We all had rather creative explanations for what 
> that kleenex box did.
>
> Turns out that was the icon for "Print".
>
> So we naively asked him, wazza matter with the word "Print" to mean 
> "Print"? And, you know, if we don't know what the word "Print" means, we 
> can look it up in a dictionary (or these days, google it). How do you 
> google a box of kleenex?
>
> A phonetic language is a fantastic invention. Icons are a step backwards 
> to ideographic written languages, which require memorization of vast 
> amounts of trivia (made even worse by companies that copyright their 
> icons, preventing standardization).
>
> But what, he says, about foreigners who may not know English? Well, again, 
> you can look up "Print" in a dictionary. How do you look up kleenex box?
>
> He finally mumbled something about us just not "getting it" and left.
>
> To this day, the only thing that makes icons usable is hovering the mouse 
> over it so you see the tooltip in, ahem, ENGLISH, saying "Print". Heck, as 
> I write this in Thunderbird email, the icons on the top row all have 
> English words next to them - Send, Spell, Attach, Security, Save. And the 
> print icons still look like a box of kleenex to me.

Heh, I like that story a lot.

Although I disagree with phonetic being *necessarily* better than 
ideographic. I do agree with the benefits of phonetic you describe - 
essentially "easier to learn". But the benefit of ideographic is that they 
can be quicker and easier to use *after* you've learned them.

This is something I've picked up on from learning Japanese (or at least 
trying to, I never gained fluency...or even came remotely close). Japanese 
is a very interesting language in this context because it's one of the few 
languages (actually the only one to my knowledge) that uses both phonetic 
and ideographic characters.

Children and non-native speakers are taught the phonetic alphabets first 
(hiragana and katakana), because they're easier to learn and can handle any 
word with a small number of simple symbols. Then learners move on to the 
ideographic ones (the Chinese kanji). I only ever learned a few kanji, but 
you notice pretty quickly that once you've learned a kanji you can read it 
much more quickly than the phonetic equivalent. (It also helps your brain 
divide a sentence into words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces, but that's 
not really relevent here).

I think a big part of the reason kanji is easier to read (once you've 
learned it) is that your eyes don't have to move nearly as much, and there's 
much more visual distinction between words (since there's so many more basic 
patterns). The fact that they originate from images is irrelevant since they 
don't really retain much of the resemblance they once did (a few of them do, 
like "mountain" or "gate", but only if you already know how to "see" it - 
like being told the "box of kleenex" is a printer). It really is exactly the 
same as reading "42" instead of "fourty-two". Or the standard VCR-control 
icons instead of "fast-forward", "next chapter", etc. Totally obscure if you 
don't already know them, but much quicker and easier to read then the 
english words if you do.

As far as ability to look things up: Other ideographic languages may be 
different than this (and this certainly doesn't apply to computer icons 
either), but most of the Japanese kanji (ie, Chinese characters) are 
constructed from a smaller number of common building blocks, the "radicals" 
(around 100ish-or-so, IIRC?). As such, there actually is such thing as kanji 
dictionaries where you can look up an unknown symbol. (I almost bought one 
once...)

Getting back to software, I like the words when I'm learning a program 
(whether they're tooltips or labels) since the icons are initially 
meaningless. But once I learn what the icon means, I often prefer to not 
have the words because, compared to the icons, they're just indistinct 
visual clutter (and they take up that much more screen real estate). The 
color in icons also adds yet another dimension for your eyes to lock onto 
which text labels just don't offer, at least not as naturally.

Another thing to note: While the connection between an icon and it's meaning 
may not (ever) be close enough to initially teach you what it does, the 
metaphor (even for non-physical things) is usually close enough, or logical 
enough in its own way, to help you *remember* what it does after you've 
initially learned it.




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