Realism in UI Design

Lukas Mathias writes a very interesting and insightful blog posting on the right degree of realism for UI design.  Essentially, button icons can’t be too realistic or they are confusing, and they can’t be too vague or they are also confusing.  However, with application icons (icons on the desktop), more realism is essential as it differentiates the program from others.

A great (but short) read with lots of pictures: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/01/21/realism_in_ui_design/

I would like to elaborate on Mathias’ article however, saying that in the former; button icons on an interface, the realism is confusing mainly because it breaks conceptual standards.  Some time ago, we did not have the technological capacity to create icons that were very realistic.  So for a long time, these vague looking icons developed into design patterns.  The camera button icon (demonstrated in Mathias’ article) is vague, yet universally accepted to demonstrate ‘Camera’ or ‘Take a picture’.  A more realistic camera button icon would break this pattern, therefore beg consumers to question its functionality- to question whether the realism was intentional, suggesting that its function is not to ‘Take a picture’, or to question if it a button at all.

Another reason that realistic icons are confusing is that realistic icons are often quite detailed, and therefore it is likely that the icon used by each program would look significantly different.  This forces users to figure out the meaning of the icon each time they view it (recall over recognition – a violation of usability guidelines).

Although a camera icon for ‘Take a Picture’ is very intuitive, there are some icons that are not intuitive to their functionality, yet we continue to use them as an industry standard.  We take a ‘cog’ in a program to represent ‘More/Advanced Options’; however, in real life a cog does not represent this.  We *could* change to a different and “more intuitive” icon, but then users would be confused as this breaks the design pattern we have become accustomed to.

The Application Icon is different because it wants to break these design patterns.  Windows Media Player is in direct competition with QuickTime Player, therefore Microsoft and Apple respectively want these applications to have markedly different icons.  Perhaps this is also a design pattern – perhaps we have come to accept and expect that program icons will be all different.

It’s amazing how something so small and seemingly insignificant such as the level of detail in icons really affects our overall experience of a product.  A great article by Mathias that really opens up a world of ideas.

Thanks to William Darling for finding and passing along this interesting blog.

Social Recursion

Courtesy of Joe Heller

With the prevalence of social hypermedia (Myspace, Instant Messenger, Facebook, Twitter) it seems as if we’ve continued on this trend of ‘globalization’ not only globally, but locally.  That doesn’t make sense right?  What I mean is- our lives and the lives of our friends are starting to become increasingly intertwined as we simultaneously integrate all aspects of our being with technology.  (Think of the world shrinking- Globalization.  This not only brings strangers from around the globe closer to us, but also our already-close-enough friends and family).  Digg updates your Twitter which updates your Facebook and vice-versa*.  Its Social (application) Recursion.  An Infinite Loop.

At the same time, it seems like we no longer have a Myspace persona or an IRC persona.. they’re all bleeding together into an “Internet Persona”.  Because of these ‘linkages’ in data, it seems that anyone can find out information about us just by following the data trail.  Creepy right?  Then why do we keep pumping our precious life stories into these social media websites?  Is it that we realize our lives are fleeting and we’re trying to leave a footprint albeit digital?  Are Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter really so engaging that it is impossible to disconnect ourselves from them?  Eventually will we spend more time online than in-person?! And then never want to come back to the real world after rescuing an alien race and fighting an epic battle for a girl resulting in the abandonment of man-kind!? Crazy.

We may THINK we’re updating our page on “what we’re doing”, but what we’re really doing is updating our page.  We’re recursing.   When will it end?  Whats the exit condition?  This is Web 2.0.  Web 3.0 promises to be even more integrated into our lives.. only we wont manually be updating our Facebook: context-aware smartphones will do it for us automatically.  We’ll be eating dinner at a fancy restaurant and all our friends will know what we ordered, and who we’re with.  We’re not that far off now.  I think only then can we get away from this “social recursion” – when we’re not actively taking part in it we can continue to live our lives without our thumbs on the Tweet-pad.

*Bonus:

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook finally announced that they will be integrating all of their services into one application.  Its called You-Twit-Face.