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Posts: 25 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Feb 2009
#48
Originally Posted by namtastic View Post
Yes, but there's a BIG difference between identification and instruction. Iconography is about identification.

Again, we're focusing too much on icons- or text-only, and not on whether these icons are instructional enough. The only way you'll find that out for sure is by user-testing with people who have **never used Fennec before**. We, by the very nature of being on this forum, are not valid test subjects.
I ran a mini-test with my wife, who is no dummy at computers (she is able to Screen Share into our Mac mini HTPC just fine, knows what SSH is, and does light admin of the computers at her office). I ran Fennec, handed her the tablet and stylus, and set it up as such: "Being a Firefox fan (which she is), you've just seen that Firefox Mobile is available and you've downloaded it. When you run it, this is the first screen you see. What do you do next?"

Ultimately the answer was "I don't know what I'm supposed to do." First, she thought the hand was representative of a link cursor, and thought the icons were clickable (they aren't). Then, as I suspected, she mistook the tabs icon to mean something about the Maemo environment, since (a) Maemo has a left-panel, right-content UI of its own and (b) the app doesn't start up in fullscreen mode, so you can still see Maemo's task space on the left. I kept reminding her that it was a browser, hoping that the controls icon might click with her, seeing the left and right triangles. But that's the problem as well -- they are triangles, not arrows, which is what you'd see in Firefox. Ironically, she actually dragged out the tabs panel about a quarter-way but not enough to open it up completely (so it quickly vanished), but didn't make the connection because it wasn't expected and she was too focused thinking it might do something else.

The most egregious part of all is that the location bar ISN'T IMMEDIATELY VISIBLE. This meant until she figured out the drag gestures, she couldn't even use the browser at all, not even to type in a URL.

BTW: Once I told her (and her mother who was observing as well) what the icons were, she said "Oh come on, who would figure out *that's* what they mean."
Touché