Icons in the fast-user-switching menu: mock

[Manu Cornet]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks a lot for responding on this subject. Your input has always
sounded like good common sense to me :-)

I do believe that icons allow for faster identification so I'd rather
push for icons everywhere in menus & buttons instead of nowhere, but
designing some of the missing icons would indeed be virtually
impossible, and if there's no empirical evidence for this it might
just be my own idiosyncrasy. I'd love to hear about such
experiments/user studies if someone ever makes them.

Thanks again,
Manu

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi Manu
>
> On Nov 15, 2008, at 9:10 AM, Manu Cornet wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> The new Shutdown/Suspend/etc. actions in the top-right
>> fast-user-switching applet look great! However, I was wondering if
>> adding icons next to the menu items (as we usually do in GNOME) would
>> be a good idea? Or do you think it would add too much clutter?
>
> One of the things that makes Gnome in general look messy and unpolished is
> that almost every menu item has an icon -- and where an item doesn't, it's
> not for any reason relevant to users, it's because nobody has drawn one.
> (Sometimes they haven't had time to, but other times there just is no
> possible understandable icon.) And as far as I know, there is no empirical
> evidence that using icons in a typical pull-down menu makes them faster to
> use.
>
> Upstream we're currently considering how to reduce the number of icons in
> menus. <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469>
>
> Meanwhile, as Baptiste pointed out, we do use icons for the various IM
> statuses (because for those, we're fairly confident icons *do* help you
> recognize the item you want more quickly). It's a bit awkward that they're
> on the right rather than the left, but the rationale is to line them up
> exactly with the equivalent icon in the panel itself.
>
> Cheers
> --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
>
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