How the Universal Symbols for Escalators, Restrooms, and Transport Were Designed
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
1. Companies tend to copyright them, rendering a universal set impossible. At least these universal symbols are not copyrighted.
2. If you don't know what they mean, there's no way to find out.
Take the universal symbols (though not in that list) for on and off: | and O. I still cannot remember which is on and which is off. I can't find out, either, without googling for it. With the words "on" and "off", I know what they mean.
And more importantly, if I do not know English, I can trivially look up "on" and "off". Why is "|" as a symbol better than "on" as a symbol?
Why is "Helvetica Man" inherently better than "men" and "toilet"? Knowing English is not necessary to recognize the words "men" and "toilet" with just as much facility as having enough savvy to remember that a silhouette of a man means "mens toilet".
Back in 1985, an Apple salesman showed up at our company to sell us on Macs. Part of his spiel was passing around a sheet of paper with icons on them and asking us what the icons meant. None of us had used a gui before, and he was bitterly annoyed that we guessed wrong on nearly all of them. The one I remember most we decided represented a box of Kleenex. (That one was the 'print' icon.) The air went out of his presentation after that.
The idea there was that there was something wrong with using English words, like "print". A phonetic language really is a great advance. Words can be looked up in a dictionary. Where are icons looked up (especially if they are different on every system due to copyrights)?
Is learning a dozen standardized English words really harder for someone who knows no English than learning a dozen icons?
When I use a gui app, I still have to hover over the icon that somebody got a design award for (sarcasm!) hoping that the coder saw fit to add a tooltip so I know what it does.
For one simple reason: If you know them, they're far quicker to read. Take road traffic for example. Everytime I visit America I notice how much more efficient clean, distinct symbols are: Practically everything is conveyed by written out words "Speed Limit", "No Parking", "No right turn on red", "No U-Turns" and so on. Such signs require, that I read and parse them. In fact, if one understands English it's probably taking longer to recognize a sign, because several functional units in your brain try to take precedence on the interpretation.
In Europe we have very distinct symbols for each and every traffic regulation. The effect of this is that you can read them very quickly (it happens almost unconciously) and more importantly it even works if you glimpse them only in the periphery of your vision.
Once you know what they are. You might think they are all obvious, having grown up with them. But they aren't. I went to Germany when I was 9, and they most assuredly are not intuitively obvious.
Ironically, I was told that the European traffic symbols came about because the Europeans could not agree on which language to use. The only exception was they adopted the U.S. "STOP" sign.
It's not easy and is super frustrating and arbitrary when you're first going through them in preparation for your test. But if you want a license, you do it. And then you know them.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Ze...
It's abstract in the extreme. You have to know what it means via a prior learning process, as there's no relationship with an everyday activity. For my US driver's license I had to learn maybe 50 signs, and they were easy to categorize based on shape and color (white rectangles are a restriction such as speed limits). For my European driver's test (for USAFE) it was over 200 different signs, and each had to be learned individually as they seldom had commonalities.
The "Autobahn begins" sign is fairly intuitive, though:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Ro...
Require that most icons include a recognizable component for indexing purposes, and assign an arbitrary ordering to those components. In fact, that's what we do with letters too -- it's just that the number of letters is small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical#Table_of_radica...
To be fair, the chinese writing system is also phonetic. The problem isn't that phonetics aren't represented; they are. The problem is that a lot of additional information is also represented.
And that makes all the difference. If there were 214, would you remember the order? Me neither. I don't remember the ASCII order, either, and keep a chart handy. That's only 128, and I use it often.
> If there were 214, would you remember the order?
I might; remembering a fixed sequence of 214 things is certainly well within human capability. But if I did it would be as a point of pride rather than because that's something I think is reasonable to expect of everyone.
But this just goes to my point. I am a college educated man, and have worked in tech for 40 years. Yet I did not know those symbols were supposed to be "1" and "0" until I was told. (None that I've seen looked like "1", which I would have recognized as "one", they all looked like "|".)
Even getting past that, how would someone who is illiterate implicitly know that "1" and "0" represent an electrical engineer's view of digital circuitry?
I don't grok the thought process behind these symbols. Either that, or I'm a retard. (The Apple salesman had no explanation, either, as to why icons were better. He just thought it was trivially obvious, and was baffled that we didn't immediately "get it".)
People are usually OK with small numbers. So:
1 - there is a thing.
0 - there isn't a thing.
(I know that you went with 'O' and '.' for "city" and "no-city",[and it worked nicely, thank you,] but come on ... ;-)
The myth of the intuitive interface[1] continues to plague software design. Currently it takes the form of heatmaps which only tell you what people are familiar with and not what is actually useful. A UI should not be measured by whether it can be learned easily. Good interfaces improve efficiency when used by people who are sufficiently knowledgeable in how to use them. Using a mouse is quicker than typing alone.[2] The perception that mice are slower is because you often see less adept people using them in a hunt-and-click manner.
[1]http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html [2]http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._Keyboard/ind...
http://thomasbyttebier.be/blog/the-best-icon-is-a-text-label
Note, FTA:
> They changed one of the three male figures riding in an elevator to a female figure.
In the link you posted, the three figures in the elevator are all Helvetica Man. OTOH, the "nursery" symbol is a baby, not a bottle. So it's not the original symbol set, but it might not be the most up-to-date, either.
EDIT. The "exit" symbol is interesting. It's a circle split vertically. I don't recall ever seeing that before. (Or perhaps I saw it, but had no idea what it meant.)
http://www.aiga.org/uploadedImages/AIGA/Content/Tools_and_Re...
The symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human. The symbol for "woman" is the outline of an adult human, but wearing a dress. So, male is considered the default. Masculinity is the absence of femininity.
The symbol for "toilets" is the symbol for "woman" (an adult human with a dress) next to the symbol for "man" (an human), with a dividing line between them. We heavily associate toilets with sex segregation, apparently.
They also show their age: the symbol for currency conversion lacks the Euro and instead has a French franc!
I'm pretty sure the intent is that the symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human wearing pants and a shirt -- that the variations like "arriving flights" and "customs" aren't, respectively, a nude figure with a brief case and a nude figure with a load-bearing belt inspecting luggage. If you want to critique the bias, its not "male as default", its "current gender-stereotypical clothing as the distinguisher between genders".
To me, it shows the outline of an adult, physically fit male human. Observe the narrow hips and wide, square shoulders. Compare with the shoulders on the "woman" symbol.
> The symbol for "toilets" is the symbol for "woman" (an adult human with a dress) next to the symbol for "man" (an human), with a dividing line between them. We heavily associate toilets with sex segregation, apparently.
It shows a pair of adjacent doors, one labeled "men", the other labeled "women". It doesn't mean sex segregation - quite the opposite, it means that in this building, toilets for both sexes are located right next to each other! (As opposed to on different ends of the floor or on different floors altogether, which was common in older architecture.)
You have a point there.
> It doesn't mean sex segregation - quite the opposite, it means that in this building, toilets for both sexes are located right next to each other!
The notion of "toilets for [...] sexes" is inherently sex segregation. It's not "separate but equal" (in the ironic sense), but it's still segregation. Unisex toilets, on the other hand, are not sex-segregated.
I felt like all it meant was that a baby-changing table was installed, which really has very little to do with feeding the baby. The two uses are temporally separated (most times).
We ended up going to a café and asking them instead, which of course worked fine but was more costly since it guilted us into having something too. :)
Babies are normally breast-fed, and should be breast-fed. Breastfeeding is one of the most important activities of motherhood. The bottle represents an unnatural and less-than-ideal replacement, and insults and cheapens mothers.
That's my take on the contemporary arguments. Modern arguments would have a slightly different feminist spin ;-)