Graphics in lines of text?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Patrick Brady wondered: <<Recently, a marketing person suggested we 
insert a small thumbnail in the text of the actual button that a user 
pushes.  So, instead of "Press Enter," it would be "Press (then you'd 
see the graphic of the key)". He wants this throughout our manuals.>>

For text buttons, such as Enter and Tab, a graphic adds very little to 
the clarity or efficiency of the communication. But for buttons that 
are iconic, such as "that thingum that looks kinda like a bug smashed 
on the windscreen of a car, or maybe a dyspeptic octopus, and it's 
colored sort of green, sort of blue", the graphic is clearly easier to 
recognize. Those kinds of graphics do a great job of communicating, and 
should be used more often.

BTW, we're only half a dozen messages into this thread, and I've 
already seen replies along the lines of "what does a marketing person 
know?" While I'm among the first to be skeptical of marketeers, I'd 
also note that it's prejudicial to ignore anything they say by wrote, 
and that many of them came up through the trenches as technical 
writers. That's the long way of saying that it's easier to work with 
them than against them, particularly when they're right.

<<We're resisting this request.  First, it plays havoc with line 
spacing...>>

It doesn't inevitably affect line spacing. You can often shrink a 
graphic to the size of the surrounding text without compromising its 
legibility. As well, most software lets you select inline graphics and 
change their leading to zero or a negative value so that the text 
doesn't wrap around it. A nice compromise, if your layout permits, is 
to display the icon in the white space at the margin. Readers learn to 
look there if they don't automatically recognize the name of the 
button. (Of course, an overabundance of icons can make the book 
resemble paper used to line the bottom of a parrot cage, so use the 
approach with some discretion.)

<<we don't think our users need it (the marketing person is telling us 
about 'eye movement' studies, and saying how much easier it is to 
comprehend)>>

They're right--at least partially--and it's refreshing to see someone 
applying the results of research to make the user's life better. 
Encourage them! Among other things, Marketeers are higher up on the 
pecking order than we are, and it's very useful to have one on your 
side in certain situations.

It's always easier to recognize the image of a graphic than it is to 
translate a textual description into a visual image, then seek that 
image and hope that your mental image matches what's actually in the 
interface. Don't forget, the "Enter" key is obvious, but very few 
people recognize "the adjust leading for graphics but not text" icon on 
sight, particularly if this icon isn't used frequently.

Try this amusing trick if you don't believe me*: Rearrange the icons on 
a colleague's desktop (or more sinister still, in a toolbar in Word) 
and watch their dismay as they try to find a favorite icon. Turns out, 
most of us writers types (being primarily textual rather than graphical 
in our visual skills) give up on recognizing the shape of an icon, and 
learn to click at a certain position on the screen instead. The power 
of visual communication does have its limitations!

* Okay, _I_ was amused. Don't try this on people with no sense of 
humor--or on people with a much better sense of humor than yours and 
who might be tempted to revenge. <g>

<<and, since many of our manuals are translated, we fear major problems 
if we insert graphics within the text.>>

If you're going to all the trouble of translating, surely the graphics 
get translated too? It shouldn't be an enormous burden to create new 
screenshots of the graphics of the buttons; in my experience, with 
SnagIt, it takes far less than 1 minute per button, and that's on a 
slow network where much of the delay is in saving the image to disk. 
Managing a few dozen more translated graphics shouldn't be an onerous 
burden for your translators.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)