Re: Click X, or click the X button?

[jennysubs -at- mac -dot- com]

I can see where this would be useful in some contexts.

My audience is people who manage really big switches in really big  
data centers--like stock exchanges and wireless carriers. I think  
they'd kill me if I put in a picture of every button. Much of the  
audience will probably ditch the elegant web-based GUI to use the  
command line interface.


Jenny




On Oct 22, 2009, at 4:22 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote: (regarding using  
pictures instead of text to describe buttons)

> It slows down users because when the content is cluttered with
> unnecessary images they have to scroll more.
>
> Usually when I see that stuff there's lots of other makework filler.
> At one of my old jobs, one doc shrank from 2000 pages to 130 after we
> switched to a more minimalist approach.
>
> Even if there is some marginal benefit to users, I don't believe that
> it could possibly be enough to justify the extra time the tech writer
> has to spend doing it.

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