[Sigia-l] Iconic paradigms

[Listera]

Timothy Karsjens:

> what do your users think about the iconic paradigms?

One could rephrase that question as: what did users think of the pencil icon
*before* convention established it as the editing symbol? Ditto floppy disk,
padlock, etc.

A lot of this is simply preponderance of usage. I'd love to go back to zero
hour and see what happened (if any tests were done at all) when users first
saw the pipette or the magic wand icons for more abstract notions in
Photoshop for example.

If the choice before the user is between a well established convention like
the floppy (no matter how dated it may seem today) and a more rational but
less well-known and perhaps more abstract one, I think I'd know the answer.
But I'm also interested in *introducing* new concepts for which conventions
haven't yet been established. Yes one can and does do an A/B test on users.
I am however interested in the process *before* that happens, during design.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.