[Design] notification: little icons

[petite_abeille]

On Wednesday, Dec 4, 2002, at 23:27 Europe/Zurich, Kaitlin Duck 
Sherwood wrote:

> Or I could have a different icon for each of my groups: bosses, 
> immediate colleagues, others at my company, family, friends, skydiving 
> team, mailing lists, etc. and each group has an icon whose border 
> changes color.  (I'd want my mailing list icon's colors to change less 
> rapidly than my boss'.)

This all sounds very funky, but I don't think goes far enough: mostly 
static icons are a waste of time.

On the other hand, providing much richer visual feedback is something 
worth investigating. For example, email client traditionally represents 
a message with a little envelope... Always the same envelope... Over 
and over again... What about using that little "icon" to convey more 
information about its underlying data: make it thicker if its a "large" 
message, dusty if it's an old one. Put an "urgent" stamp on it if it's, 
well, urgent. Turn it into a parcel if it has attachments. And so on, 
and so forth. There is a lot of visual feedback that one could convey 
in a small icon. This would give some information "depth" to those 
pictograms, instead of just wasting screen real estate.

In fact such an approach could be extended to all icons. A folder: make 
it slim, covered with spider nets and feeding to show that you never 
look at it (aka information decay). Document icons? Same deal as for 
messages. And so on. A lot to be done in this area...

In any case, if todays computer can run Quake, they should be able to 
provide richer -information wise- icons to.

PA.