Icon Test Results Revealed
August 4th, 2009 by Anne WielandTo the nearly 200 (173, to be exact) participants in our icon test: Thank you all for taking part! We got great results in terms of the quality of the Tine 2.0 icons (which are, in fact from the Oxygen Iconset). Also, we would like to thank you for all the comments you gave: Many of them were really encouraging, we got many compliments, but also some valuable criticism and tipps.
How did the icon test work?
We not only recorded which icons were chosen for which terms, but also how long it took you to decide.
From that, we could calculate three values:
- “Strength of association” (Indicates what percentage of the users assigned this icon with this term.),
- “Discriminatory power” (Indicates wether and how often this icon was assigned to other terms as well.) and
- “Conspicuity” (Indicates how fast the icon was chosen by the user in proportion to the average.)
In the pictures below you can find the three values on the left in the above order. The three values together give an overall Rating between 0 and 10. After a few tests we conducted, we can say that only icons with a rating above 8 can be seen as perfect for a term.
What is very apparent in all the results: The Oxygen Icons are not made for Tine! From the few terms we wanted to find the perfect icon for, only “User” got a rating above 8:
The weakest rating was achieved for “Today”, which is very interesting, because I expected this to be the most evident one:
Here are the results of all the other terms:
Add Appointment:
Add Calendar:
And Resource:
What do we learn from that?
First of all, we need icons that fit better to the special Tine 2.0 terms. Of course, the Oxygen Icons are a great start, but they just don’t fit all of our needs.
That’s why we want you, our community, to contribute!
- If you use Tine 2.0 and you see an icon which you think doesn’t fit: Tell us!
- If you are an icon designer and love to play with pixels: We need you!
- If you know how to visualize complicated things with as little complexity as possible: Write us!
- And even if you just know someone of the above (or know someone that knows someone :), we would like to hear from you!
Please write your ideas and suggestions to: tine.calendar@gmail.com or post in the Tine forum.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:45
I think the ratings for “Discriminatory power” are a bit strange: Every icon has the the highest rating (10)? In the case of the green crosses in “Add Appointment” and “Add Calendar” this could not be … at last they are the same symbols for different tasks.
In my opinion it would best to use “logical combined icons” for adding stuff: If I like to add something (calendar, user, resource, …) I will look for and “add Symbol” (like the green cross). To distinguish the different types of “add Symbols” there should be a second element in the icon representing the kind of stuff (resource, user, appointment, …) to add.
August 5th, 2009 at 11:43
The aspect “Discriminatory power” is a bit misleading in this test. It indicates how often an icon has been chosen for other terms as well. In this test we did only ask for one term per set of icons (within one module of the test) - so there was no chance that the same icon could have been sorted to different term in the same module as well - hence all icons get te maximum score on this value. As the test of course is an indicator, not something you shoul follow blindly, this is actually not a problem…
And yes, the main result of the test is: we need new icons for Tine - just using some more or less fitting icons from Oxygen does not take us where we want to get to… Your suggestions point to right direction there