How do you feel about icons for increased usability?

would icons added to webmasterworld increase usability for you?

[jeremy goodrich]

Just a moment ago, I thought -> I need to flag this thread.

Then, I forget where the 'flag this' link was found. I scrolled up. Not there. :( Scrolled down.

Looked, saw a bunch of links. Realized, I would need to read some of them, my subconcious failed to absorb anything out of the blended gray blur (also, I now use my glasses at the computer - nearsighted :) )

So I thought - a lot of sites use small icons to go with their navigation. We have, imho, some very cool ones. What if we added some to the footer?

I know, I know - that's a lot of bandwidth. But, would it help the user experience? Help me figure out what those options are down at the bottom of my screen? It seems like it could help, but I thought I would throw the idea out there.

[jatar_k]

personally, i like the text links, i often have to mouse over little icons to figure out what the heck they are supposed to be.

but hey, I'm just a programmer so my sites are all text anyway. ;)

[jeremy goodrich]

Oops, I meant -> icons to go with the text links.

icons, by themselves, are useless :)

[WibbleWobble]

They would be useful. What with the other links under the reply footer, its often a menagerie of baffling links, it comes down to having memorized where the reply link is, rather than it being easy to distinguish.

[Marketing Guy]

Interesting, if somwhat longwinded and only partially relevant story, but Im going to tell it anyway:

I have a site, www.widgets.com.

A competitor registered www.widgets.co.uk and setup a similar site (ahem...very similar).

My site consists of loads of articles, a small directory and a discussion forum (Snitz forum).

The other one similar (but not as good - or original ;)).

I got in contact with someone I knew on another forum when I was developing my own - basically asked them to contribute to mine (we lacked regulars).

1st email I sent I included a link to my site, but he hand typed it in and used .co.uk not .com!

He sent back a few comments about the site (alarm bells were going off in my head - he wasn't raving about it like others had...), and one thing he mentioned was that the forum was fairly complicated - he couldn't even work out how to register or post. He also said "all the buttons were really confusing".

This confused me as Ive kept my forum as simple as possible (used text links instead of graphics in most cases).

But after a few emails, the mix-up was sorted and he raved about my site (they all do... ;)).

The point is that the other forum (either Vbulletin or PHB at the time) was found by a very non-technical user to be too much - too many options - too technical.

But the basic forum format I used (text links) was found to be easy to use.

Back to the WW forum question:

Given that 99% of users here are tech-savvy, then changing formats by including icons wont have any negative impact on usablitiy - we are all capable of adapting to it.

But in general, text links tend to be much easy to use.

Scott :)