Icons in GUI

I have doubts about the efficacy of icons. The icon is functionally both a switch and a label. Like most personal computer users, I use icons as on-switches. Click on an icon and you start a program or open a window.

So we treat our Windows and Apple desktops as control panels laid out with labelled switches. As a control panel filled with switches, the desktop of an Apple or Windows GUI is not well-designed. However, the format has spread to other devices with GUIs.

The visual effect of an array of icons can be pretty, particularly with brightly-coloured icons set against dark backgrounds, creating a jewel-box effect. But two factors make interpreting the data on the desktop inefficient: the small size of the icon and its uniform dimensions. The larger the desktop and the greater the number of icons on it, the more difficult it is to identify the correct switch for a desired function. Large numbers of distinctively coloured icons tend to dissolve into a field that looks randomly coloured, like a pointillist painting without a subject.













This desktop (my own) shows my attempt to group icons in distinctive patterns so as to help me find the switch I want to use. There is a little bit of functional convergence in my sorting of icons into groups of related programs and document types. But I find it to be an inadequate solution to the problem.

One alternative to icon-based controls is to follow the example of flight deck controls. A well-laid-out flight deck on an aircraft is a varied physical and visual landscape, which privileges important functions by making their control switches large, distinctively shaped and coloured, and centrally positioned relative to the operator. Even the dashboard of a car shows this coherence and natural fit in the design of its controls. I suppose a computer's steering wheel is its keyboard and mouse, and its video display is more often a window into an unfolding data landscape – like the sky for a plane or the highway for a car – than a control panel. But when the screen shows the desktop, it is a control panel. In GUIs of the moment, it functions poorly.