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Semiotics

Caveats

Most if not all pages are just rough notes, and these pages as a whole are far from complete. More notes will be added in time, eventually, maybe.

If, from reading these notes, you conclude that I am off my rocker, you won’t be the first, and you may even be right. These pages may simply position me as an acolyte to the late Gene Ray.

No doubt there are a dozen and one reasons why none of this would ever work, but perhaps somewhere deep down there is a tiny fragment that could be used for something.

Contents

Nomenclature and meaning

Should a graphical system rely primarily on text, or on symbols, or on both?

Symbols offer ready recognition of specific commands and indications (especially when in colour and given distinct shapes), but they don’t necessarily have any inherent meaning. Even where the meaning is easy to discern, the symbols chosen are often impractical to describe. Menus are variously indicated by a triple bar symbol “≡” or a vertical ellipsis “⋮”. Few people will be able to name the latter, and the latter is typically described inaccurately as a “hamburger”. The inability for people to describe the symbol according to its role is of concern, and suggests that people likewise have nothing in their vocabulary to describe the function or effect of the control. The hamburger button does not offer a selection of hamburgers.

The typical icon size of 16×16 pixels has limited scope for visual details and cues, and many icons are essentially meaningless symbols intended to be rote learned. Microsoft’s Azure portal has a healthy range of icons, but many of them have little to no inherent meaning, and the colourway chosen limits the expressiveness of the icons to that which can be practically represented using only the colours permitted.

Care has to be taken to ensure that users can describe effectively what they see (such as when writing instructions) and to ensure that the meanings of commands and the nature of items depicted by icons can be discerned readily. Icons are helpful but the user needs some way to discover their meaning and to describe them afterwards.

Standard symbols

There is a lot of ambiguity in the semiotics of computer systems. For example, take the following symbol:

This symbol can represent any of:

The same interface may (as with ConnectWise Manage) use the exact same symbol in the same window (or on the same page) for completely unrelated purposes.

Likewise, a rotated chevron has no defined meaning either:

This symbol can represent any of:

(A button that shows a menu should close the menu if the menu is already open, but all too often will close and immediately re-open it.)

Any of the following symbols may represent a menu:

Note that the “hamburger menu” symbol can also be used to collapse the side panel. “New Outlook” does this: the “hamburger menu” symbol that looks like it will open the menu bar merely collapses the left side panel, leaving the user confused as to where exactly they are meant to look to find the actual menus (of which there are none).

Although there is nothing that can be done to stem the tide of stupidity, within the OS each task must have a dedicated symbol, allowing the user to know at all times what the outcome of clicking any symbolic control will do.

Note that this has important ramifications for themes, because symbols will in some cases be theme specific, e.g. slide, expand/contract or scrolling. Although one could argue that symbols need only be consistent within a theme (allowing for example a Mac-like theme), this introduces a critical requirement that stock symbols exist in a library so that anyone designing a new theme can trivially re-use all the stock symbols semantically (not merely visually). Software that introduces custom controls, especially custom compound controls, also needs to be able to incorporate, semantically, stock symbols.

Standard icons

Save

“Save” has for decades typically been represented by an icon of a 3.5″ diskette. These icons are frequently so poorly drawn as to only bear a passing resemblance to the actual item, an object that younger generations will have no living memory of.

The question: should a new, more universally meaningful icon be chosen? If yes, what on earth would it look like?

Note that, as per the saving changes page, there is no guarantee that manual save will be retained.