unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Conscious ;)

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 05:57, Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> Frederik, I think you are confusing things. Vish didn't say the intention
> was
> to eliminate each and every textual information possible, just the
> tooltips.
>

My Response was confusing, i'll rephrase partly:
Generally observed, we are currently moving towards a more transparent
system architecture, both on the surface (UI) and beneath the hood.

The usage of symbolic visual language improved the system towards better
(network-)transparency and easy to understand UI logic.
Not only by the introduction of Symbolic Icons¹ but also through semantic
ontology capable software technology such as xdg utils or dbus.

we hardcode less absolute features into our software (constant values, fixed
strings) and create more scalable technologies, interdependencies,
intercommunication (IPC), generative abilities (fuzzy search, etc) and more
dynamic objects into our more and more modular systems..

The change towards symbolic Ayatana indicators makes buttons and widgets
more dynamic. This all can be easily implemented with text based items e.g.
via font-style, but we can all agree that it is much easier to use symbolic
icons here.

Noam Chomsky is often quoted for his thesis about a universal grammar²:
We all have a higher awareness of figure and form hard-wired into us
natively, which makes it easy to design a visual interaction language with
symbolic visual metaphors, which every human being can intuitively
understand, contrary to what many people on this list believe. It is
possible to design a visual superlanguage, understood by every human.

i see this language rather in the usage of well designed visual metaphors,
than in the highly conventionalized and cryptic written languages such as
English, French or German.
The Sugar DE attempts this for the first time, AFAIK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%28desktop_environment%29



> The bad situation is when an unclear icon tries to solve its unclearness by
> adding a tooltip. The problem is extra, unnecessary text, not text itself.
>

I'm not trying to say text alone is the problem; it is just that text is a
highly elitarian form of communication, especially because of how it
restricts the users reading behaviour (horizontal, RTL, complex tiny
orthography which is unusable from a distance and only poorly scalable).
We now have highly advanced visual language through symbolic visual
metaphors that are well designed to be understood by as many humans as
possible.


> Some indicators are better being textual, like indicator-datetime. I
> personally don't see anything wrong with that.


hahaah of course there's nothing wrong with exceptions, they are there to
prove the rule. Certain things are simply better put in words, than in
icons.. for now...

¹ http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SymbolicIcons,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol

² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar