telophase | (no subject)

Hey guys--can you take this survey for me about icon choices on our website? (Note: this isn't the official survey I sent out to the library staff and which will probably go out later in the year to the university's community and whose answers will take priority over anything I learn here; I just got curious as to whether the results would be different for a different population, so made a duplicate of the survey to see.)

The only things you'll need to know if you're not familiar with our library are (1) "FrogScholar" is basically a search engine that searches a group of the library databases, plus the catalog, plus a few other things. (2) "Database" is a broad term for libraries that basically means "online reference works": they could contain journal articles, abstracts, company information, encyclopedias, directories, ebooks, chemical information, and all sorts of other stuff. And, yes, data sets. smile emoticon*

* I copied this text from my Facebook post and the smiley transferred as that. I found it amusing.

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Done!

I am, um, really bad at icons, though, so I don't think my answers are going to be very helpful...

Actually, they'll be very helpful--most especially there's no icon that says "database" in the way libraries use it, and the "official" database icon is pretty damn obscure anyway. Toby had to tell me it was stacked drive platters, as I always thought it looked like an oil barrel! It'll always be next to the word "Databases" and never by itself, though.

Including icons for various categories is more an aid to people scanning the page quickly than anything else, so there's a bit of redundancy designed in.

I recognized the stacked platters but thought it was too obscure for general use. :)

How right you are! XD

Nice. Is it okay to use the same icon for the two searches, assuming the entry blanks will be in different parts of the page? It's hard to distinguish between "search this" and "search that" otherwise.

ETA: Searching the library's website only is for things like "opening hours" or "holiday" or "reserve study room" right?

Edited (clarification) 2015-03-02 20:44 (UTC)

Alas, no, because this is the context. Although, if it helps, the icons will never be used alone and will always have the category title next to them. I had been doing the design without the icons at first, and the page looked wrong, somehow, and when I put icons in front of the title, it sprang to life.

Can't design my own icons because reasons.*

* okay, because I'm using a font icon set for that, and it's supposedly using fewer server resources and less bandwidth to serve them up than equivalent images, and I'm stuck with the 400+ icons in that set. :D It certainly makes it easier to resize them and to display nicely on retina devices without having to have multiple sizes of the same icon, so I'm actually happy to use the fonts.

edit: this reply crossed with your edit!

Yes, the website search is only for things like that. Admittedly, much of that content is in LibAnswers, and in an ideal world I'd be able to have a search that searched both things (we're working on it), but for now I'm stuck with both of those separate, and the resulting confusion in the minds of our users.

Edited 2015-03-02 20:53 (UTC)

I like the icons, and I find them unambiguous.

(I did know about the database one, but I can't recall where I've seen it before. Skeumorphism FTW.)

So far, everyone pretty much agrees with me (and the library staff) that four of the five options are obvious and the databases one isn't. XD

My impetus for creating this second survey and opening it beyond the library staff was wondering if the top icons (so far) for the database category in the library-staff survey were being influenced by the way the database page results list looks. Results so far: ambiguous. As I expect from my tech-oriented friends, the official icon is winning (out of 13 respondents) at the moment, but the two that the library staff like are hot on its heels. I'll try to remember to post about the results in a few days.

Edited (clarifying) 2015-03-02 21:20 (UTC)

Yeah, I expected to be an outlier confused person in your survey. I regularly get my Thunderbird, Scrivener, Notepad++, and Chrome icons confused. I am just not visual. :] My brain only registers "thing of this size" not so much, you know, color or shape.

:) Everyone's different! Which is why I'm not relying on icons alone.

I've also got some threads going through the site: green is an action (like a search button), while orange is an attention-getter. Links aren't green, because that seems weird, but if you click on something green, then something is going to happen, so there.

edit: Got distracted. Meant to add--this will help people who cue off shape (for buttons), color, and text.

Edited 2015-03-02 23:09 (UTC)