[WEB4LIB] Re: Library Websites that use

[Andrew Darby]

I think you're covering your bases better by having an icon + brief 
descriptive text + a good alt tag.  If you're providing crucial 
information in a tiny image, you're probably doing a disservice to some 
of your users.

Visual icons, of course, mean different things to different people, and 
something which might seems pretty clear to you, might be more opaque to 
someone from a different culture.  If there's text, at least you can 
look that up in a dictionary.

Having said this, an icon works awfully well in some contexts (like an 
electronic resources page), so a clear and obvious legend would probably 
help.

While on the topic of icons, I'd add that just grabbing some clip art 
icon (or graphic) to stick on your page is a quick way to make your site 
look--how does one put this delicately?--crummy.  If no one on staff is 
comfortable making images, maybe you could rope in a student for a 
high-profile project they could stick in their portfolio?

Andrew Darby
Web Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
http://www.ithaca.edu/library/

K.G. Schneider wrote:
>>Another use of icons that helps are those orange rss icons. When I
>>look at a site and wonder if they have RSS feeds I often scan for that
>>icon. If I don't see it I might glance for text about syndication but
> 
> 
> This is an example of an icon that is only useful for experts. I look for it
> myself, but I agree with others who say this icon is badly named, whether it
> is called RSS or even worse, XML (we use the latter on our site but plan to
> change it). (Well, RSS has a whole naming issue, a story for another day.)
> If you don't know that the orange icon means "here lies an RSS feed," it is
> meaningless, and if you click on it, you see puzzling code. It's not unlike
> naming all links on a page "HTML." And yet if you rename the link to a text
> link called "syndication," people looking for the orange icon miss it. 
> 
> I'm glad the questions about icons and testing came up, and particularly the
> comment about huge mysterious icons in catalogs, and also the distinction
> between big graphics and actual icons. 
> 
> Not sure what testing would reveal about the little print/mail icons, but I
> see NY Times and Epicurious offer the icons AND write out Email/Print. 
> 
> I dimly recall reading, almost a decade ago, that one issue with icons is
> forcing the user to translate from the picture to what it means--not unlike
> when libraries use all kinds of colored dots on books which require patrons
> to refer back to lists to translate what those dots mean. 
> 
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
> 
> 
> 
>