Rockstar Icon Designer - Kate McInnes [8]
With touchpads becoming common in the marketplace, explaining how to perform complicated actions is made clear with the use of icons. Illustrations provided by GestureWorks.
Consistency is Key to a Good User Experience
Users like consistency, take Apple for example. You know that if you purchase an Apple product, it will behave in the same way other Apple products behave. You know that you will see the same visual language used on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers; even the Apple website uses the same visual language. All of these items have been styled to work together as a single user experience. Apple goes to great lengths to bring the user a seamless working environment that - even on different devices - will only have to be learned once. The secret to this is not to keep the interface exactly the same, but to guide the user through familiar landmarks (or in our case icons). So another lesson we can learn is that visual consistency is best achieved in subtle ways. We can use the same icon style and approximate location across platforms while changing the dimensions of the interface to compliment the device it's on. The strength of icons as communication really shines in this respect. A user will know the approximate area of a screen to locate an icon, once the design has caught their attention they will immediately remember its function. Because icons will need to be viewed on many different screens in many different sizes, it is also possible to conclude that the number of sizes required for a single icon will increase, this is something we're already seeing with the dynamic icon scaling in Windows 7 and the high resolution icons required for the Apple retina display.
It's best practice to have the same user experience for devices running the same program or operating system.
Innovation is a Double Edged Sword
Innovation will get you noticed, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. If we look back at the BeOS icons, their playful use of colors and metaphor is definitely pleasing to the eye, but it has also caused some of the meanings to be confusing. If you plan to make a set of icons that has an unusual theme or new styles of metaphor, be prepared to test them extensively before implementation. Sometimes what is clear and easy to understand to a designer can be extremely confusing to the target audience. Innovation shouldn't necessarily be avoided; without innovation we wouldn't have the shiny hyper-realistic style of icons that we have today. Just be prepared to invest additional time in user testing and planning if you want to make a new style work.
BeOS icons are examples of creative metaphors, but sometimes the meaning can be hard to recognize.
Design Guidelines
Icon Basics
An icon is a visual representation of a function or action within a graphical user interface (GUI). Icons are commonly used as a visual marker so people of any skill level can easily familiarize themselves with a computer program or operating system. A successful icon has a heavy focus on concept over aesthetic and should quickly and clearly communicate its purpose.
If you take a closer look at icons throughout history you will notice that over time a visual language has evolved. Unsuccessful icons have fallen by the wayside, while successful icons such as the Trash can, have become irreplaceable in our vocabulary.
The bomb was used as a symbol for system errors within the classic Macintosh and Atari TOS operating systems. Modern systems use the universally recognized symbol for alert, which still conveys the nature of the error but in a more precise and less alarming way.
Now we know the rather dry