About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design

This Part of the book is about communicating with your users, and we would be remiss if we did not discuss ways of communicating to the user that are not only helpful to them, but which are also helpful to you, as creator or publisher of software, in asserting your brand and identity. In the best circumstances, these communications are not at odds, and this chapter presents recommendations that will enable you to make the most out of both aspects of user communication.

Your Identity on the Desktop

The modern desktop screen is getting quite crowded. A typical user has a half-dozen programs running concurrently, and each program must assert its identity. The user needs to recognize your application when he has relevant work to be done, and you should get the credit you deserve for the program you have created. There are several conventions for asserting identity in software.

Your program's name

By convention, your program's name is spelled out in the title bar of the program's main window. This text value is the program's title string, a single text value within the program that is usually owned by the program's main window. Microsoft Windows introduces some complications. Since Windows 95, the title string has played a greater role in the Windows interface. Particularly, the title string is displayed on the program's launch button on the taskbar.

The launch buttons on the taskbar automatically reduce their size as more buttons are added, which happens as the number of open programs increases. As the buttons get shorter, their title strings are truncated to fit.

Originally, the title string contained only the name of the application and the company brand name. Here's the rub: If you add your company's name to your program's name, like, say "Microsoft Word," you will find that it only takes seven or eight running programs or open folders to truncate your program's launch-button string to "Microsoft." If you are also running "Microsoft Excel," you will find two adjacent buttons with identical, useless title strings. The differentiating portions of their names — "Word" and "Excel" — are hidden.

The title string has, over the years, acquired another purpose. Many programs use it to display the name of the currently active document. Microsoft's Office Suite programs do this. In Windows 95, Microsoft appended the name of the active document to the right end of the title string, using a hyphen to separate it from the program name. In subsequent releases, Microsoft has reversed that order: The name of the document comes first, which is certainly a more goal-directed choice as far as the user is concerned. The technique isn't a standard; but because Microsoft does it, it is often copied. It makes the title string extremely long, far too long to fit onto a launch button — but ToolTips come to the rescue!

What Microsoft could have done instead was add a new title string to the program's internal data structure. This string would be used only on the launch button (on the Taskbar), leaving the original title string for the window's title bar. This enables the designer and programmer to tailor the launch-button string for its restricted space, while letting the title string languish full-length on the always-roomier title bar.

Your program's icon

The second biggest component of your program's identify is its icon. There are two icons to worry about in Windows: the standard one at 32 pixels square and a miniature one that is 16 pixels square. Mac OS 9 and earlier had a similar arrangement; icons in OS X can theoretically be huge — up to 128×128 pixels. Windows XP also seems to make use of a 64×64 pixel, which makes sense given that screen resolutions today can exceed 1600×1200 pixels.

The 32×32 pixel size is used on the desktop, and the 16×16 pixel icon is used on the title bar, the taskbar, the Explorer, and at other locations in the Windows interface. Because of the increased importance of visual aesthetics in contemporary GUIs, you must pay greater attention to the quality of your program icon. In particular, you want your program's icon to be readily identifiable from a distance — especially the miniature version. The user doesn't necessarily have to be able to recognize it outright — although that would be nice — but he should be able to readily see that it is different from other icons.

Icon design is a craft unto itself, and is more difficult to do well than it may appear. Arguably, Susan Kare's design of the original Macintosh icons set the standard in the industry. Today, many visual interface designers specialize in the design of icons, and any applications will benefit from talent and experience applied to the effort of icon design.