Icons in procedures?

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

Kathleen Snow wondered: <<Do any of you embed icons directly in your 
procedures? This can create an ugly line break, but I want to know if 
this is a good practice.>>

Embedding icons in text is a far more successful approach than the two 
alternatives: defining the icons once and requiring readers to memorize 
a bunch of cryptic semi-logical bitmaps (works poorly at best*), or 
describing the icons (e.g., click the thing that looks like a squashed 
8-legged arthropod, colored sort of chartreuse, about an inch down and 
three inches in from the top left corner of the page). Neither is a 
kindness to the reader.

* One thing that can work well (and I've used it in the past in a 
couple technical reports) is to bind a folding quick reference sheet to 
the back page of the manual. Readers can then fold out the reference so 
its visible to the right of the pages as they read, providing a nice 
visual key to the icons. Of course, then you have to teach them where 
the quick reference is...

One good solution is to use the text name (e.g. "Click the Save As 
icon") for the icon in the text, then place the icon itself in the left 
margin to provide a visual reminder. Arguably the most effective 
approach is to provide a screenshot of the interface, and define the 
procedure as a series of numbered callouts, arranged in logical order 
(top to bottom, or clockwise around the screenshot). The effectiveness 
of this approach has been demonstrated quite convincingly in some Dutch 
studies. (By van der Meij?) I plan to use that approach in a book on 
onscreen editing I'm currently developing.

Line breaks shouldn't be a problem in software that lets you insert a 
non-breaking space (which keeps the words or objects on either side of 
the space together). I imagine you could also kludge this using a 
non-breaking hyphen (colored white) to connect the words surrounding 
the icon to the icon, but this would throw off word spacing if you are 
using full justification.

The bigger problem is usually with wildly uneven line spacing, since 
presenting the icons at visible size (with small type) generally causes 
the leading to be defined by the icon, not the text. You can sometimes 
eliminate this problem by selecting the icon and setting its leading to 
the same as that of the surrounding text, but then the icons may run 
into the lines above and below the icon. Other software lets you adjust 
the "baseline shift" so that the graphic is centered on the line of 
text rather than standing above it. Most times, you're forced to shrink 
the icons as much as you can without making them illegible, then adjust 
the text to use relatively wide leading.

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


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