We ask the questions concerning experience, usage behviour etc. simply because we want to be able to analyse the results further and to understand how the background influences the understanding of icons.

I mean, really, sometimes an icon is more cumbersome than the words. I kept thinking to myself, “I’m pretty sure I know which one they had in mind, but it really doesn’t fit and/or make sense.”

Also: I’m on a small form factor machine with a max resolution of 1024×768, and I generally don’t like to browse full screen. It would be nice if your survey would fit into the browser window instead of using a fixed size and forcing me to scroll for every answer. Now *that’s* bad usability…

There is no way to be sure that user has selected the icon because she/he knows it is correct one (already used) or that he believes it just fits to question but is not best for it.

And when the scale of the icons are very limited, test had ~30 icons(?) and if question is “Draft”, there is very small amount of icons what can actually fit to that function because user does not have multiple choises from different icons what would actually resemble the “draft”. Like if 90% icons are about arrows to different directions, a lock or a camera and 1-2 has similarity to paper and pen or storing for later user, the 90% icons there does not give the user the possibility to express real truth what icon is best there.

I was waiting that there are multiple versions for every action what have be done. So we can choose best of them. Not that there is over 90% icons what does not even resemble the function what is questioned.

To make a analogy, it was like 90% of people who you can vote are white and only 10% are black and you have 10 person who you can vote. You can not get truthfully results if you ask “Select the person who would not be seen in the dark so easily”. But if all person who you can vote are colored by their skin, the voter need to actually thing more and you can get more accurate results for better results. Like if 10% are white, only for very weird reason someone would vote him/her as answer for same question.

I made many such choices because I did not understand at all that I can just vote “empty” by not selecting the icon and pressing Next.

There were many icons what should be fixed but they were familiar now from KMail.

There really should be “None of shown is good” -choice there or someway to tell “I see this fits best from these all options, but it could be much more better”.

Like there were question what is best icon for inbox… who would really choose the arrow left or the arrow right icon? Or who would choose a icon showing STOP sign?