Icons and OPACs

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Abstract
Determines whether iconic interfaces might work with online public access catalogues (OPACs), and assesses problems which students encounter in using icons. Students from the UK and France were asked to identify IBM, Mac and hand-drawn icons and guess their functions. Mac icons were the most easy and hand-drawn icons the least easy to identify. A number of students failed to guess the icon function second time round. Results suggest that an icon-based OPAC interface could be popular, but would require careful design, particularly for a multilingual interface.

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