GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 531454
Rethinking the About icon (the star usually stands for Bookmarks)
Last modified: 2008-09-04 01:14:41 UTC
GNOME uses a star for the "About" button/menu entry which may not be appropriate for 2 reasons : 1°) i can't see the metaphor behind the star that would make me think of "About" function From GNOME HIG (Chapter 9. Icons) : Rule of Thumb for Icon Metaphors "If you have to think about an icon to 'get it', the metaphor is too complex" Also from mozilla wiki FLOSS Usability : Does the star really mean bookmarking? Stars seems to imply rating, but bookmarking is kind of like a very primitive form of rating. http://wiki.mozilla.org/FLOSSUsabilitySprint1107/Heuristic#User_control_and_freedom_.28undo.29 2°) Having the star for About may cause confusion since a lot of (and i think more and more) applications outside GNOME use the star for Bookmarks : Firefox, MS Internet Explorer, Gmail, etc. Therefore users may be acustomed to have a star standing for Bookmarks From GNOME HIG (Chapter 9. Icons) : Icons can assist the user in rapidly scanning a large number of objects to select the desired item. Particularly after a user is acustomed to an icon's appearance, they can identify it more rapidly than a text label. Also from MacOS HIG : Users will learn your application faster if the interface looks and behaves like applications they're already familiar with. Reflect the User's Mental Model : The user already has a mental model that describes the task your software is enabling. This model arises from a combination of real-world experiences, experience with other software, and with computers in general. maybe the star should stand for Bookmark instead of About ? Or maybe the star should just not be used for About ?
Thanks for reporting, but please, don't fill "this metaphor is not ok" bugs, they are not helpfull at all, we all know that some of our metaphors are bad but we do not have anything better. New metaphors suggestions are appreciated thought. You use Jakub's icon theme status page to have an overview of all g-i-t icons, http://people.freedesktop.org/~jimmac/icons/
"About" can be seen as a "?" or "(i)" http://www.alsanews.fr/images/divers/information.png i guess see also gtk-dialog-info
Really, about shouldn't have an icon at all. We could remove the one from gnome-icon-theme very easily, and it would still be a star, as that's what gtk+ has for the stock about icon. Using dialog-information as the icon wouldn't be any better. The best solution is to do like the other OSes and have no icon here, I think. I believe KDE somehow re-uses the application icon for the About menu item. I don't think that's a good idea either.
another illustration of the statement i've made in the initial report ("Having the star for About may cause confusion since a lot of (and i think more and more) applications outside GNOME use the star for Bookmarks : Firefox, MS Internet Explorer, Gmail, etc. Therefore users may be acustomed to have a star standing for Bookmarks") is Google Chrome web navigator see http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-screens/8.jpg (from this web page http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-02-n72.html )
Please see Comment #3. We really should avoid an icon for the About menu item. Star as bookmark is also a horrible metaphor, but it's not a good metaphor for "About" either. In fact, nothing is a good metaphor for "About" really, which is why we should just not have an icon. But you will have to convince the GTK+ hackers to get rid of the stock icon. Removing it from gnome-icon-theme isn't going to change anything.
Created attachment 117973 [details] customs officer icon proposition for About icon customs officer
Created attachment 117974 [details] bar code icon proposition for About icon bar code
What about changing the current about icon (star) for another one related to identity ? I've first thought to a bar code icon but maybe a customs officer icon could be more explicit ? I've attached above 2 illustrations : the customs officer icon is from Firefox 3 icon set ( http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/granParadisoUI/icons/iconInventory.html )
There is no good metaphor here. Reusing another metaphor only dilutes that metaphor. One should not reuse icons for other meanings. And like I already said multiple times, changing the icon in gnome-icon-theme isn't going to solve anything. If you want to change the about icon, file a bug against GTK+ asking for the icon to be removed. Or maybe you should be asking KDE/Firefox/Whatever to use some other metaphor for bookmarks instead of a star. Like perhaps an icon of an actual <b>bookmark</b>. The star is not a good metaphor there either.