An icon with a magnifying glass image is usually mapped to a 'zoom' function...that's what I thought till someone pointed out that in MS Word, Excel (which are very other commonly used applications), the print preview icon has a magnifying glass superimposed on a blank page. Now, how is that supposed to convey that the action on clicking the button will be a 'print preview'? !!
How is it that we are used to clicking on this icon for viewing a print preview without confusing it with a zoom option?
Any thoughts?
4 comments:
The tool tip helped initially. Then i got used to it. :-)
Discoverability vs intuitiveness? :-)
Actually the mag glass for "zoom" is far less used than the one for "search". Which is also clearly inappropriate to use. But equally as confusing. I think the problem is that MS came up with some of these metaphors so long ago before we really had established guidelines on what to use where. And now they are afraid to change it even if it made more sense. I know with Vista they made some changes to icons that no longer made sense. But some still exist.
It's a matter of context, i suppose. Where you see an icon has to lot to do with what it means. Atter all, a case could be made for "magnifying glass = print preview" because you're actually gonna be looking very closely at the final simulated output, exactly what you'd do with a magnifying glass.
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