Literature Review on Icon Design

This project was a literature review on icon design and was focused on determining the factors responsible for an effective interpretation of the icon. It’s user focus was senior citizens.

The aim of the study was to try and understand the reasons for misinterpretation of an icon. It reveled a strong relationship between human age and icon interpretation. This interpretation also affected the overall usability of an interface utilizing these icons. 

What are icons?

Icons are metaphors representing a highly complex system in a simplified pictorial fashion. They are designed to activate an appropriate mental model within a user’s brain. They provide several advantages to a system.

  1. They can be easily recalled, recognized and memorized.

  2. They can be uniformly used across international borders. They provide uniformity to the system.

  3. They are economic in space utilization i.e., they are able to convey a big, complex concept without using a lot of interface area.

Study

It was observed that the rate of icon identification and interpretation decreases with increasing age. The deteriorating faculties in elderly makes it difficult for them to interpret and interact with interface icons. 

Some of the factors affecting the interpretation of an icon are:

Icon complexity : It is the factor that determines how quickly does a user searches an interface for an appropriate icon. Simple icons generally have few visual features, making them easily distinguishable. It has been observed that elderly are not comfortable with some of the complex present day icons. Lesser visual features in an icon provides room for greater variety across multiple icons. Icons with more visual variety are easier to search in a display. This helps older adults to identify and interpret the icons correctly. Thus, it is generally recommended to have a collection of visually simple icons on the interface.

Familiarity is defined as user's familiarity with an icon, it’s metaphor and mental model associated with it. A lot of studies show that older people are not able to identify and interpret icons properly because they are not familiar with the relatively new concepts like upload, download, undo etc.

Context of the icon also plays a major role in its interpretation. A lot of factors play a role in setting the context of an icon. Designers have tried to create categories of these factors to understand & design better icons dependent on these factors. Context can include things like:

■  Physical characteristics of the icon 

■  The nature of display,

■  Task complexity and workload 

■  Time of the day 

■  User skills and preferences

Contextual things like icon categorization, task complexity, workload and general usage time(time of the day) should be taken into consideration while designing an icon. This contextual information becomes very important for applications that are susceptible to time of the day and have safety related consequences.

Concreteness is defined as the resemblance of an icon to a real world entity. It was observed that people find it easier to identify and interpret icons that resemble well to a real world entity.

Icons which do not resemble closely to any real world entity are known as abstract objects. They represent information using graphic features like shapes and arrows. These abstract objects have less obvious connections to the real world objects, hence they are difficult to interpret. Users prefer icons depicting concrete and familiar objects, or icon with an obvious link to the real world entities. This is more pronounced with older adults. Thus concrete icons make a system more usable and approachable by all age groups, especially elderly.

Labels can give definition to icon. Icons can be displayed with or without labels. In various experiments, it was observed in that icons with labels help users identify them easily. In terms of correctness, time and use of help, text labels and icon-label interfaces worked better than only icon interfaces. Labels are also highly beneficial for first time users. Interpreting an icon for the first time is difficult because it requires interpreting the pictorial symbol and then mapping it to the desired operation. Associating label with an icon is highly recommended.

Text labels help people in disambiguating the meaning of the menu choices. It helps people retain the icon-function relationship. Elderly people do not use mobile phones very frequently so they tend to forget the functionality related to the icons. Having labels help them retain metaphors and mental models associated with these icons.

Semantic Distance/Articulatory Distance is defined as the distance between visual representation of the icon and it’s intended functionality in the application. Short articulatory distance means that the visual representation and intended meaning are very close to each other. This distance decides the initial usability of an icon.

Icons should have a clear link to it’s application functionality. They should enable easy relation with real world entities, which help interpreting the associated functionality.

Conclusion

To convey large amounts of data, we need solutions that can be interpreted quickly and efficiently. This is why icons are considered a powerful way of representing big & complex concepts using small & simple graphic elements. 

In order to create an good icon, designers need have a correct understanding of concepts like commonly understood metaphors, mental models and human psychology. In order to convey the right message, an icon should have a strong and direct association with the desired meaning. It should be simple, concrete and contextual. The design should be should use familiar concepts with labels and small semantic distance. 

This leads me to conclude that for correct icon interpretation, it should be designed to represent concrete information from familiar context using visually simple graphics.