A Picture Is Worth…
Many of the medical-technology companies I work for ask us to develop interfaces that use no text–icons only. It’s one of my least favorite conversation with a client. We sit in front of a very long list of product features; I envision a very simple menu system, organized to let the user easily find what he needs; the client says, “of course, we want to sell this in Europe and Asia, so everything has to be icon-driven. My heart sinks. I understand why companies want to make everything icon-driven. It’s about the cost of translation, and the associated cost of regulation. Changing a piece of text in the software that drives a device may mean going through regulatory hoops–and if you have to jump through those hoops in every country, that’s trouble. On the face of it, icons are much cheaper: find the global symbol for everything in your system, and there’s no translation, and if the icons are right there will never be a reason to change them.
The problem, of course, is that interaction with a product is a conversation. I inquire as to what the device can do; it tells me. I ask it to do something; it tells me how it did. But like conversation with another person, it only works if we’re speaking the same language. Don’t bother trying to speak to me in Dutch; I only know a couple of words (like “wentelteefje”).
Similarly, the chances that the user of a medical device will understand a 32×32 pixel picture to mean “there is an air leak around the seal of your mask” is slim. Mainly this is because there is no such picture–as the designer of the system, I had to invent it. Sure, to me, it says “air leak” clearly, but it’s not like there’s a universal symbol for the concept. Sometimes, we can claim plausible deniability by using a symbol from a library of standards–ISO publishes such a library. But, to be honest, with the exception of symbols for common things, like “power,” that we’ve all seen so many times that we can now associate symbol with concept, most of those symbols are mostly meaningless in and of themselves.
And that’s the point. Icons don’t have meaning. They are shortcuts that stand for something we already know. They’re cultural shorthand–assuming I know what a printer is and does, a little picture of a printer can probably be counted upon to communicate the concept of printing. But that’s a big assumption, and it works because it’s been reenforced for us for years.
But if we have to make up an icon for some new concept, we’re inventing new words in the language, and that’s not OK. In the end, no matter how hard I try and no matter how many usability tests we perform to gauge how well a user understands what an icon refers to, my confidence is low. Good design talks to me in my language. The answer is probably not to invent new words, but to simplify systems to the point that translation only need happen for those terms that we really need to understand.
