I was having an interesting conversation with Alex Jones the other day, remarking about the usability studies by Peter Steen Høgenhaug around the ‘link’ iconography in CMS software. Alex touched on this in his blog with Usability of the Link Icon and earlier with Replacing the Save Icon. It’s interesting when we encounter patterns in systems that other designs tend to perpetuate and we create learned patterns that users who interact with our systems get used to over time.
As Alex points out, Høgenhaug did test with users unfamiliar with the CMS software and were not used to patterns in those systems even though many systems use very, very similar iconography. It would be interesting to see that case applied to frequent users (a simple pattern learned once, to be sure).
I’m a big fan of re-evaluating systems on a regular basis because I think it keeps UX professionals fresh. I’m always worried that too often, as technology changes, as systems become more complex and evolved, we rely on older iconography, older user patterns, and the ‘traditional’ ways of thinking. I feel that we should be looking deeply at the user base to come up with new and innovative methods to teach users new structures rather than relying on old habits and patterns. Saving to a disk may no longer be a useful user action, versions could be closer to the path you want users to take. Sharing, Tweeting, Manipulation – new and interesting actions have cropped up for users. It’s up to designers to take a step back and look at how these actions are taken in the system and craft designs which encourage these actions but are not confusing.
