Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore 713
theodp writes "The Floppy Disk Icon, observes Scott Hanselman, means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. That, and other old people icons that don't make sense anymore — Radio Buttons, Clipboards, Bookmarks, Address Books and Calendars, Voicemail, Manila Folder, Handset Phone, Magnifying Glass and Binoculars, Envelopes, Wrenches and Gears, Microphones, Photography, Televisions, Carbon Copies and Blueprints — are the subject of Hanselman's post on icons that are near or past retirement age, whose continued use is likely to make them iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery to many."
Let's see now... (Score:5, Informative)
Microphones...still used everywhere, they've just changed their shape.
Magnifying Glasses..still used to see small things, or did I miss out on the genetic change given people 20-10 eyesight.
Binoculars...see Magnifying glasses [I suppose they are less common just because fewer people seem to be spending time experiencing the great outdoors].
Televisions...um, what Universe is this tool living in?
Wrenches and Gears...I guess once everyone now over 30 dies, civilization ends or everything has switched to using magnets
I'll concede on the floppy disk and tape... (Score:5, Informative)
But all the other ones are just plain wrong...
Only the name is wrong with radio buttons...
I, and most other people who have to take paperwork away from a desk, use clipboards daily,
Books are still quite normal around here, especially if you've been to school,
People still use address books and calenders, electronic devices supplement them,
Voicemail icon yes, it is dated,
Every office I've been in has had lots of beige folders,
Almost every desk phone has a handset that looks somewhat like that, even VoIP phones,
Physical magnifying glasses and binocuilars are still for looking for stuff,
Most people around here still get at least bills in envelopes,
If said 20-something has ever known anyone who took shop classes they should know what a wrench is (though what a wrench has to do with settings, I don't know),
Microphones like that are still used in recording studios and on bar stages,
Polaroids look like prints...,
Might not know why it's got feelers, but it still looks like a TV,
Last time I made a carbon copy, I was filling out a waybill... last Thursday (also a mimeograph machine does not do carbon copies, it makes mimeographs)
Skeuomorphism (Score:5, Informative)
The term is 'skeumorph' - it's like a wheel with decorative spokes. The wheel no longer needs them for strength, but they're there because a wheel 'needs' spokes.
The other obvious one is camera apps making a shutter sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph [wikipedia.org]
Re:Leave the icons alone (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Old people icons" (Score:4, Informative)
That example is backwards, we called them records because they held recordings.
This line of text is terminated by a "line feed." (Score:4, Informative)
Or maybe by a "carriage return" followed by a "line feed." You see, the text I am writing, and that you are reading, is written in ASCII which is based on the Model 33 Teletype. On a Teletype, a carriage return character (0x0D) would cause the print head to travel all the way to the left; a line feed (0x0A) would cause a roll of paper to move vertically upward by one line.
The modern experience of "going online" is derived from the fact that the Model 33 Teletype had a rotary switch that controlled an electric motor. This switch had three positions, "Line," "Off, and "Local." At my high school, one prepared computer programs in BASIC using "Local" mode so that the program could be punched onto paper tape, one character at a time, while the Teletype was disconnected from the computer system.
Use of computer systems had to be paid for according to the amount of time used, measured in seconds or even milliseconds. Computer time was then too expensive for a user to be allowed to sit at the Teletype keyboard and manually enter keystrokes; instead, after the entire program was punched onto paper tape, the switch would be turned to the "Line" position and the paper tape reader would cause the program to be transmitted to the computer at the Teletype's maximum speed of 110 baud. This was known as "going on Line."
Early microcomputer systems, like larger computers, used Teletypes as I/O devices and ASCII was used internally to store and interpret alphanumeric data. This continued long after users migrated from Teletypes to video display terminals, e.g. DEC VT-100, and then to the IBM PC as the I/O device of choice. Many special function keys from the Model 33 remain in use [asciitable.com] to this day, for example the Esc (0x1B), Ctrl, Backspace (0x08), Tab (0x09) and DEL (0x7F) keys. The DEL (Delete) code is 0x7F because hitting DEL would cause all the holes in that row of paper tape to be punched (get it, 0x7F). So if you made a typing mistake you could back up the paper tape by one character and type DEL, this would punch through your errant character and the computer would ignore the DEL character.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
you morons aren't actually assuming that a radio button has anything to do with an actual radio are you? that would be just sad
Great, then "read and weep" works doubly in this case: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/tfmb4/til_why_radio_buttons_are_called_radio_buttons/ [reddit.com]
Re:Drop the confusing pictures (Score:3, Informative)
"320x240 displays were the norm for Windows 3.1"
VGA was the minimum for Windows 3.1 and it was 640x480 with 16 colors.
The previous standard was EGA and it was 640x350.
Re:Let's see now... (Score:4, Informative)
What Universe is this tool living in?
Scott Hanselman is a principal program manager at Microsoft. (I am not joking.)
Re:"Old people icons" (Score:5, Informative)
This comment does not make sense. Both old and young people are using the icons the same way: the learn the meaning and then they recognize the icon in a different environemnt. I am one of the older people, I knew what a floppy disk is and I knew what saving is, but when I first time saw a floppy disk icon, there is no way I could have figured out why on earth a "floppy disk" would mean saving a file. Icons are conventions and it does not matter if recognize original object behind the convention.
Turns out, there is actually some scholarly findings about how older and younger audiences understand and use icons. I just finished up a grad course on information design, and it included research on this topic.
For example, Charalambos Koutsourelakis & Konstantinos Chorianopoulos wrote in the Information Design Journal in 2010 [IDJ 18(1), 22–35] about "Icons in mobile phones: Comprehensibility differences between older and younger users." They selected icons from mobile phones, and tested older v younger audiences to determine how well they understood the intended meaning of each icon.
In short: Koutsourelakis and Chorianopoulos found that comprehension of icons differs based on the age of the audience. Icons with a high-level of abstraction that do not have immediate real-life metaphors were often difficult for audiences to grasp.
Koutsourelakis and Chorianopoulos did not comment on the qualities of successful icons common across age groups. However, their samples of successful icons suggest icons that provide a metaphor to real-life activities, and those with which users may have some prior experience, are most likely to be understood by both age groups. Successful icons across both age groups used a tools metaphor to represent “Settings”, and a depiction of an address book for “Phonebook” or a calendar for “Organizer”. Audiences in both age groups found these icons easy to understand
If you're curious about their results:
Top 5 best icons for younger users:
Top 5 best icons for older users:
The 5 worst icons for younger users:
The 5 worst icons for older users:
So while I agree icons are conventions, and sometimes you just learn what an icon "means", people really do associate certain real-life metaphors with actions that are represented by icons.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
You know, those aren't the only icons that nobody has any idea of the meaning anymore. Those 26 icons were also once created from real world metaphors, and nobody has any idea of their old meaning anymore: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Heh. You're quite wrong about that. Try asking google about "Latin alphabet" (or "English alphabet" if you want to do one more click), and a bit of clicking on the obvious links to predecessor languages will quickly track down the origins of most of those icons (actually glyphs). Some of them such as J and W, were invented as modifications of the Latin letters for languages that had more sounds. But most have an origin in Phoenician writing, augmented by letters from a few other languages.
Thus, the 'A' started life as a Phoenician letter rotated maybe 140 degrees counter-clockwise, in which form you can see the face and two horns of the bull ('alif in most Semitic languages) that it represented. The letter actually referred to the glottal stop, which is treated as a separate consonant in the Semitic languages, but the Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the first vowel sound in the word.
Similarly, the history of each of our letters is quite well known. Most of them did start off as a pictograph, but many centuries of borrowing and fancy writing by scribes modified them so they hardly resemble the original icons. Sometimes the history is a bit weird. For example, Phoenician had a letter that looks much like our W, but they are unrelated. The Phoenician w represented a "sh" sound, and was the ancestor of the similar letters inthe Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets. But the English W originated as "VV", which was used centuries ago because Latin didn't have the needed letter. Eventually the two Vs were run together, to make our modern W (which we call "double U" due to another rather silly historic misunderstanding).
Anyway, if you were to say that the original meanings of the English letters is unknown to nearly all modern people, you'd be quite correct. But saying that nobody knows this information is quite wrong. You can even find it in wikipedia, if you care to dig a bit. But it's not very useful information, so you should only go looking for it if you find the topic interesting.