Shel Kennon

Icons placed next to button labels are like bullet points placed next to items in a list. Both can make information easier to find and scan, as long as they’re placed in the right spot.

Eyetracking research has shown that users scan from the left in a vertical movement. In order for icons to serve as a visual scanning aid, users need to see them before they see the button label. Placing them to the left of your button label allows users to see the icon first. If you place icons to the right of your button label, they’re not helping users scan because users see them last. If users read the label first, your icon serves no purpose other than decoration. Icons describe button labels, not the other way around.

Icons are also misplaced on button labels with body text. Users scan from the left in a top-down vertical direction. This means when you place icons to the left-center of button labels with body text, users will see the button label before the icon. This doesn’t help users scan. To make your icons a visual scanning aid, align the icon with the button label instead of centering it with the button label and body text. Users will then be able to scan easier because they’ll see the icon first.

Icons and bullet points work similarly. Bullet points are effective because they draw attention from the rest of the text on a page. Icons are effective because they draw attention from the rest of the text on an interface. If users can’t find your button labels easily, they’ll have trouble navigating your site. Place them where they’re easy to scan, and they’ll be able to find your buttons in less time with less work.

So it happened like this…

A bunch of friends of mine kept telling me that I needed to listen to this podcast called “Welcome to NightVale” because it was delightful and weird. Several of them described it as “Lake Woebegone meets Lovecraft.”

I did indeed listen to the podcast, and it was indeed delightful and weird, and you should totally go track it down because they deserve all the acclaim they get.

However.

It is not at all like Lake Woebegone meets Lovecraft. Lake Woebegone is the town in Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, of which I happen to be a totally rabid fan* and I was going “Oh my god, do any of these people listen to Prairie Home Companion? Because this is not that! This is a very nice little community radio spoof, and PHC…is a radio variety show with a monologue. Seriously! And anyway, if you were going to do a parody on a Garrison Keillor show and make it freaky and weird, you wouldn’t even pick PHC because it’s too long and you’d have to be a master humorist to pull off the small town thing and you can only throw tentacles at a Lutheran pastor so many times before it stops being funny so obviously the one you’d want to parody would be the little short daily podcast he does called The Writer’s Almanac where he talks about stuff on this day in history and then reads a poem and ohshitthisisactuallyagoodidea.”

From this we can conclude that the inside of my head hates and fears punctuation. And that I was staring at the Farmer’s Almanac calendar on the wall next to my desk. And that I clearly don’t have enough to do with my free time.

So, um, from there we got to this. Which is a podcast that I wrote and made Kevin read. Which is about three minutes long, and called The Hidden Almanac, and tells you about what happened on this day in history in a totally fictional world mostly inside my head, tells you what feast-day of what totally nonexistent Saint it is, and provides some questionably helpful gardening tips.

It is about three minutes long and will occur Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, until we get bored or you people start mailing us roadkill to make us stop. (Please do not mis-address the roadkill to KUEC. We will not eat roadkill on KUEC unless it comes in a prepackaged container with heating instructions.)

You can download the latest (there’s only one right now, but we’ve got a couple of weeks in the bag) or listen to it online at www.hiddenalmanac.com

iTunes links will be up and running shortly!

*Yes, okay, Vin Diesel, Garrison Keillor, David Attenborough, My Little Pony…I’m complicated, okay? 

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

I’ll be at GenCon next weekend in Indianapolis Indiana at table 1451 in the entrepreneur avenue.