“The deadline is in twenty minutes. Launch illustrator, after effects, photoshop, flash and get to work…”
I dropped all of adobe’s icons in the doc to see how confusing they would be.
This is the wheel that is the justification or system for the icons.
Just cross posting something I wrote on the Adobe labs forum for the Photoshop CS3 beta. This subject is always creeping up again:
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I am seeing a lot of Yes/No button labels (when replacing a previous workspace for instance). It’s not good form to use those. It’s much quicker for users to assess an actionable term like “replace” on a button and act on it. “Yes / No buttons” require the user to read and understand the entire error message and then make the mental leap to agree or disagree with it, thus slow down the user interaction and make more room for error.
There was a story involving an euthanasia machine made by an Australian doctor connected to a Windows terminal, that drove the point home. After choosing cancel it would ask:
Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? Yes / No
Much more clear:
Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? I want to live / I want to die
Button placement can be a time sucker too: On Mac Os the default button is on the right, because people (exceptions for some languages) tend to read from left to right. They also scan the buttons left to right, so it makes the most sense to use the space on the right for the button most often used, instead of having to track back all the way to the left (a la Windows).
It would be great if you could avoid yes/no dialogs, use descriptive button labels and place the default button on the right.
It’s been a while since system 7, but a lot of these conventions now make as much sense as they did then.
Example of a bad dialogue, by the new Adobe Reader 8:
Thanks for listening,
Florian Fangohr
honest communications
for a better tomorr[oh]
Some cell phone snap shots.
smart idea. this double a battery has a flip cap and charges on any powered USB port.
two-dimensional platform game. art direction looks like a cross between ico and nightmare before christmas, sprinkled with a little rustboy.
unluckily, the poor little stoolchair seems not quite proven in practice… users of the ’stool’ position could smudge the backrest — and the triangular base might stick out a bit too wide…? (a shinbone is a device to find low furniture parts in the dark) ;)
a nicely designed chair that can easily be converted into a stool. or the other way around.
…modernization is on the way.
kanji-detective yo: “three-spring-push-cheap”…? does this gas station advertize its inexpensive gasoline “pushing out of 3 sources” i.e. regular, super and diesel?
…many thanks to akira kobayashi for clarification: what looks like 3 separate characters at the top, is actually one single kanji, with its components forcefully spaced apart: “geki” = violent, severe, intense, furious: aggressive pricing, coloring and spacing…
(western type designers: try to letterspace *inside* each letter…)
