I really enjoy confusing icons. Not in the sense of “Hey Britney Spears, if I say all interaction designers are liars, and I’m an interaction designer, am I telling the truth or lying?”, but in the sense of noticing icons that communicate absolutely nothing of what they intend to communicate. And worse, when these icons continue to thrive through generations of products through the enduring momentum of design by habit.
Maybe you can help me figure out this example. Check out these common printer icons.
These are Start and Stop icons from various multifunction printers. They include a diamond with a vertical line in the middle to indicate Start and a circle circumscribing an inverted triangle to indicate Stop. It’s obviously a trend. But is it successful? What value do they provide?
Notice the wild variations in usage. Most include the icon on the button itself, while #2 puts the icon adjacent to the label. #5 can’t make up its mind whether they go on the panel or button. #3 and #7 include proud and bold icons while #4 and #5 are subdued and meek. But in all cases, they need the Start and Stop labels because the icons themselves aren’t memorable enough to stand on their own. And if that’s true, why use them at all? Out of pure habit, because everybody else does?
In #3 is the counter-example, the standard Power icon. The design of the Power icon doesn’t communicate “power” on its own. Its origin is a mystery, the subject of many questions and few concrete answers. Nevertheless, through repeated use on many devices, the Power icon is a success. You don’t even need words to accompany it (even though this one does).
Curious, I looked around our office at other devices to see how prevalent these icons were. I found them on our standard Canon and Minolta copiers.
Do you have any theories or ideas where these icons came from? I believe they first appeared on copiers and then evolved over to printers and multifunction devices, but it’s hard to trace the history without seeing the products live. Trust me, Google Images doesn’t work very well for this type of research.
Comment and submit your theories!
The evolution from copiers to printers is curious, to me. My HP printers have the-vertical-line-inside-a-diamond etched in a green button (presumably for start), and an X etched in a red button (presumably for stop).
I say “presumably”, because the usage of printers differs greatly from that of copiers, the process is managed (including started) on the computer, and I only press the green button to get a 1 page status report from the printer. Also, I never used the red button.
All the buttons may have a common ancestor, something like
http://i9.ebayimg.com/07/i/000/7f/ff/1271_1.JPG
(notice the color coding, and the precursor of the diamond ;})
There are quite a few standard panels, buttons, keypads and displays for use while prototyping devices, maybe some early interaction engineer (designer?) had a divine inspiration and we’re blessed with the results even today.
Regarding the issue of the On/Off button: we “know” that it controls the power of the device through repetition. But I see now that MS Windows has the white on red line-inside-circle for ‘turn off computer’, and the #3 icon for ’stand by’.
I think that the two icons side by side would be confusing for me, both of them competing for OFF.
Taking a wander around the office, a couple of the generic computer cases we have here have the triangle inside circle icon as the reset button. Wacky icons those ones
See wikipedia for a picture of a
“Former British stop sign consisting of red “Give Way” triangle inside a circle. Commonly seen in The Bahamas today. This sign, with STOP in local language was common in Europe a few decades ago.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign
(second image on the right)
Two of my European household appliances (Dyson & DeLonghi brands) have alternate on/start icons: a circle with a vertical line inside it, but not cutting through like the icon on most electronics.
(My husband thought I was a little strange for running around the house looking for start/stop icons, but he suggested the vacuum cleaner.)
Altissima, thank you. That’s an excellent find. I’ll post a followup on this.
The On/Off in #3 comes from a combination of a 1 and a 0. Some early computers and electrical products had a rocker switch on the back which used binary to communicate the state of the machine. When the rocker turned to a single pushbutton, the 1 and the 0 merged into the symbol in #3.
I always took the power-on button (circle with vertical line) to be an iconic representation of the ignition switch of a car. The vertical bar is the slot where you put your key and the circle represents the motion of turning the key in the lock.
Of course, I may be the only one who ever thought this.
One of our printers (oddly, no brand name on the outside, must be a knockoff of some sort) follows this iconography, but our Ricoh printer does not. The Ricoh printer, in fact, doesn’t even use the circle and line icon for power on-off. Instead, it uses a sort of horizontal lightening bolt inside of a circle. Clearly, the people at Ricoh are in a world of their own.
Check out the standards ISO/IEC 11581-*. You have to pay to get a copy of these, but I believe they define standard icons for office equipment like this. I am pretty sure I once saw the start and stop icons defined in this standard.
As a young industrial designer working for one of the early adopters of ISO graphics standards I can report with certainty that the source of the circle and bar for off and on was an ISO standard. For anyone not crystal clear on what ISO stands for. Its International Standards Organization. See:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/introduction/index.html
Companies with large international dealings or government contracts adopted all sorts of ISO standards. I’m no expert on what all is included but I suspect that the “big” shift to the metric system in the mid 1970’s (a handful of US companies made that zillion dollar shift) was part of that activity.
The source art for all the icons was extremely specific, and to be used in its exact form and for its prescribed purpose. Circle used discretely was for off; bar used discretely was for on; bar inside the circle was reserved for controls that provided power on/off on a single control, like a push on/push off switch. As far as I know, anything else is a stylized modification that was “inspired” by the ISO standard but does not conform to it.
Whatever else is true, accurate to say that the on and off icons, as with most of the cryptic international icons were largely a failure. Even people like myself who were compelled to apply them to control panels for many years have to think twice that circle means off and bar means on.
It maybe is not so obvious to modern interface designers who work primarily with virtual interfaces why icons were so appealing in the era of physical controls – you know, panels full of pushbuttons. For every different language market a different set of hardware with unique legends was required - which for companies with lots of language markets, that could mean literally dozen of unique versions of any given product. Along came “international” icons that looked like a solution to that. Yeah well, if only users would have cooperated and immediately grasped the meaning of all those cryptic icons. Usability experts are largely unanimous that the icon thing didn’t work, and using actual text descriptors beats icons almost all the time, assuming the user is literate. Now, with virtual interfaces, flipping from one language to another in software is a relatively trivial matter and provides clarity that only text can. Icons, such as they are, still reign where a soft interface is not feasible and the user population is diverse, like for example European road signs.
The bottom left one (button arrangement, not the icons) was clearly inspired by Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!
I work in an industry using hard interface controls, and we use icons for the reasons Tim stated. The origin of the O being Off an l being on is that it represents binary code for electronics, 0 (zero) being off and 1 being on. The bar in the circle represents on/off for device power, the line breaking the circle is a standby symbol (Specified by the British National Standards Institute) and puts device into stanby mode. This symbol is often used incorrectly in place of the bar in cirlce.
The diamond with the line in it has been a standard since Xerox started using it in the 70’s for copiers. Back then they had a monopoly on dry copiers (until the government forced them to share their patent portfolio) so the design had an unrivaled beginning. I actually know the industrial designer (Jake Patla) who came up with this design while working for xerox in Rochester, NY. Later this became an ISO standard for start.
Also, the different variations of the power icon mean different things. As others pointed out, the line inside the circle (push on/off) as opposed to the circle opposed to the line (toggle on/off) but also the circle broken by the line means power-down but not off (stand-by or power-saver mode).
IEEE 1621 - The Power Control User Interface Standard
http://eetd.lbl.gov/Controls/publications/pubsindex.html
This standard can be downloaded from here for free.
Traditionally 1 represents on and 0 represents off on power buttons.
Most power buttons are a circle (0) with a 1 sticking out of the top meaning on and off.
Considering the start button is not for stopping the 1 inside the diamond must mean on or start and the diamond must be a form of saying “and that is all”, or “I don’t do anything but start.”