Options Button Graphic
- What are you trying to accomplish? Why? I am trying to make it easier to tell someone how to find the options button when viewing their tree. While this would be a significant help to FS Support missionaries, it would also be useful for anyone trying to help someone see the available options.
- What is the challenge or roadblock you are encountering? The present icon has no recognizable name.
- What is your idea? Change the icon to something like the public domain icon above (which can be found at http://www.clker.com/cliparts/3/w/Z/M/l/S/options-hi.png).
- How would solving this challenge improve your experience?" Even if the icon is small and in black and white (although color would be nice), it would be much easier to find than the button to the right of "Landscape" or to the left of the "House" icon.
Comments
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One (rather major) problem: how would you internationalize that?
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I missed the edit window to add: I agree that the existing icon is quintessential mystery meat navigation. I think of it as "eyes/fish", because it kind of looks like a pair of mismatched Horus eyes or tiny fish swimming in opposite directions. But the fix for that is very, very simple: put in a tooltip on hover, for heaven's sake. That's what tooltips are for. I have no idea why the Options button doesn't have one.
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I was about to say that of course the Options button has a tooltip. How could you miss that? But then I looked a little deeper and discovered that the Landscape and Portrait tree views do indeed have a tooltip for the Options button, but the Fan Chart and Descendancy tree views do not. Like @Julia Szent-Györgyi , I am baffled as to why those two tree views would not have that tooltip; it's especially odd that the Fan Chart has tooltips for all the other buttons, but not for Options.
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Oh, huh: the new chart views (landscape and portrait) have a different style of icon, and it does have a tooltip. I never noticed, since I only really use the fan chart, with occasional forays into descendancy, which are the two that use the apparently-old button, sans tooltip.
I know that the button is supposed to look like a pair of sliders, like on an old stereo system, and the new one does look more like that than eyes/fish, but I'm still not sure what someone would make of it who doesn't know what it is or what it's supposed to represent.
There are some pretty well-established conventional pictogram associations for many things, such as a bell for notifications, but I'm not finding any sort of consensus for what an options button is supposed to look like. Gears and "hamburger" (three lines) are common, but I associate the one with settings rather than options (which is a subtle difference, I know), and the other with aggravating hidden menus and content-free webpages.
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