If a picture is really "worth a thousand words" then a good graphical user interface should provide at least a thousand words worth of textual information behind every iconic image. Alas, in far too many cases the graphics are just decorations — designed to distract from a lack of substantive content.

(see also ThingsThemselves (13 Oct 1999), SeeingThought (19 Oct 1999), TufteThoughts (18 Dec 2000), ...)

But what about ease of use? While having a big colorful arrow pointing left above the word 'Back' in a Web browser doesn't provide any new information, it is a lot easier to find the button with a picture than the button without - RadRob

TopicProgramming - 2002-12-23

(correlates: Kubota Logo Mystery, KiloPixAndMegaWords, FoodFashionFitnessFinance, ...)