Hi Mike,

>I don't need pretty Icons on my buttons, because I don't even use icons, I use words like "add" and "edit" on toolbars. I don't feel the need to make buttons that don't look like buttons or put icons on a menu. What value could possibly come of this, except for more time and money developing something as useful as a spleen and more resources consumed? I honestly would like to hear your point of veiw on these questions.

I don't know your background to be able to judge how often you have talked with customers, watched the average user, and so on, so just a few things to think about:

First, I notice the word "I" appearing quite a bit in your statement. *s* I personally don't set up all this fancy things on my desktop, but if I watch other users they do unless their company has forbidden to do so. People often like pictures and colors, and they like it even more if they can easily change them. Not all people do, right. And whether it makes sense, I don't know. It makes them feel happier and therefore being more productive, but how much impact it has on their productivity, I don't know. This certainly depends on the user.

Second, the usage of icons is really a shortcut for experienced users, especially if icons are used the same way in different applications. Let's look at Explorer. If you want to go one step back in the file view, what would a user do. At first, they would close the window and start over again from "My Computer". Later they might discover that there's an menuitem Go > Back and they choose this one. Depending on whether they have an explorer with a text below the icon they might discover that icon sooner or later. And finally, they might just hit the backspace key. Every possibility here is more difficult than the previous one, but at the same time, every single of it is faster, too.

The picture you choose for an icon is not important, in fact, it doesn't need to have anything to do with the task. What's important is that the user can distiguish icons and associate one picture with one action. Of course, there are standard pictures that should not be changed, but only because we have memorized them, not because they are better.

Christof