A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words?
A Discussion of Icons in CARL's Kid's Catalog
by Claire V. Basney (c) April 1999
Honey and mustard. A hot dog with ketchup, or a sheepdog without. Images, even if they are only word pictures, can be enticing and fun additions to any computer tool, but images that are pictures with color and shape brighten up a tool no end. In fact, if I had to recall a description of Kid's Catalog that no reviewer seems to miss, it would be the icons on the interface. They are "colorful" (Busey and Doerr "Information Retrieval" 77). Intended as "graphically elegant" (Busey and Doerr "Information Retrieval" 79). They have "inquisitive frivolity and aesthetic appeal" (Sandlian "Global Village" 24). The pictures lead like "traffic signs" from subject to subject, into deeper and deeper layers until finally the books are listed, or just lead to a screen for typing a search, are bright-colored and engaging (Edwards 106). Especially for the privileged (American?) child, whom Sandlian describes as having "an affinity for computers" ("Global Village" 23).
Unfortunately, often with the hot dog comes the sauerkraut. One of Kid's Catalog's greatest strengths also has the potential for being a great weakness, especially if CARL's ambitions to send the tool originally designed for the Denver Public Library into use around the world become reality. Kid's Catalog has already been introduced in Singapore. No matter how brightly-colored and engaging, if an icon cannot inspire in the user's mind the idea it is designed to represent, it has failed. And in my opinion some of Kid's Catalog's icons at least teeter on the edge of that failure. I wish to explore the uses, advantages and disadvantages of the icons as CARL intends and presents them, briefly comparing and contrasting the CD ROM and Web versions of this library tool, and to conclude with my own recommendations.
The first question is, naturally, what characterizes a good icon? I contend that the point of an icon in an electronic database is to replace a lengthy verbal description of a link with a pithy image that, in Busey and Doerr's words, will "evoke the idea of [a] subject", then a good icon must first be understandable ("Information Retrieval" 79). I take this to mean that the picture representing the text must be clear and precise-at its most basic, that the child looking at the icon must know instantly what it is he or she is looking at. If it is intended to be a dog, it must look like a dog, not an asparagus.
This does not address the question of whether or not an icon should contain words. The icons on Kid's Catalog do, and in so doing include, in the eventuality that the child user cannot understand the icon, what I see as a fallback plan. In an ideal world, I would agree with Wilda Newman when she says "it [is] desirable to have the icons 'stand-alone' without text," and for the sake of discussion, therefore, I am mentally removing Kid's Catalog's helping words from their icons (9). My goal by so doing is to concentrate on the offered image itself as it is and to examine its evocative power without the crutch of text. Besides, very young children, beginning readers and the foreign users to which CARL aspires quite possibly would not have an immediate understanding of the words intended to clarify.
Specificity is as important for the image as immediate understandability. That is, if the icon is supposed to be linking to generic "books on animals," then it must not take up the majority of the screen squeezing as many animals as possible into the icon. Naturally, a zoo would indicate animals, but then the icon is no longer pithy. On the other hand, to continue the dog analogy, if there is only a sheepdog on the icon, it is quite likely that the child user will assume that this is a link to stories or information on dogs alone. That would be to specific, too pithy. A compromise might be a dog, a lion, and a whale: that way, there is a small variety and selection, and a single animal or group of animals (i.e. pets, or sealife) is less likely to be assumed.
To begin at the beginning, for the most part I believe Kid's Catalog does well in achieving pithy and evocative icons. Much better, for example, than the similar German attempt Bucherschatz/Bucher-reise (Book Treasure/Book Journey) whose concept of a piratical voyage, island, and treasure takes over the interface and icons and makes it hard to follow and use.
The icons on Kid's Catalog's first screen are simple: a keyboard, a globe, a letter-block, a stage with a person performing, a robot, and a medal/award. The keyboard, at least for people familiar with computers, is quite intuitive. Like mathematical symbols, which are assumed to be a universal language, through schools and businesses a computer keyboard is growing in easy recognition. The stage with the performer, particularly in Western nations, and the medal are also well chosen and probably, for the most part, quite understandable.
The two icons that are the least intuitive are the robot and the letter-block. When a student clicks on the letter-block and gets eventually to the alphabetical block screen, it becomes clear why the icon was chosen, but before that a connection between a preschooler's toy, and finding books in series or under alphabetical headings is not readily apparent. Sadly, the robot is even worse, for it is intended to lead to the help screen. Now I, knowing that it is the help button, can make some sense out of it. In science fiction, the role of the robot is often that of the servant. With that connotation, a robot could be seen as "helpful," but since robots are not servants in real life, and a young child might associate a robot more with a cartoon warrior or not be very familiar with science fiction at all, that icon might be more a confusion than a help. Nor is the robot as good as the web guide Surf Monkey, who talks and leads the user through his interface from the very beginning. The robot is not apparent as a guide until well down in the layers of the interface where he leads from the subject categories to the book.
As I already hinted in the paragraphs above, it seems to me that the real iconic challenge depends greatly upon the scope of the project of which the icons are a part. Since CARL has already offered Kid's Catalog in Singapore, and in the construction of a web version is making it more and more available, specificity takes on another facet: is a particular icon specific to a certain culture? With each international expansion, the task of making an icon evocative gets harder, because people's associations between words and pictures differ radically over large distances.
This problem existed long before Kid's Catalog: when the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Quotient exam began to be administered to immigrants entering the United States in an effort to prevent so-called "morons" from entering the USA gene pool, there was a section in which the test takers were shown a picture and told to tell what was missing from it. Offered a picture of a house missing something like a window next to the door, immigrants from Eastern Europe failed that part of the test because they said what was missing was that there were no storks nesting atop the chimney. Storks do nest in the chimneys in Hungary, but not often in Manhattan.
In effect, what the test-givers were running up against was a problem in evocation. The idea that was generated in the immigrant's head was not the one intended. Likewise, to borrow an example again from Sandlian, she and other designers tested Kid's Catalog with child focus groups. In their groups, children pointed out the icons that they did not understand and, in responding to one of the "Explore" icons, "unanimously agreed that Abraham Lincoln's picture triggered the image of president, and not author or biography as [the designers] had thought. As an alternative, they suggested an image of a hand writing on a piece of paper, to best represent the idea of 'author'" ("Rethinking" 24).
Following that Explore/globe icon on the first screen leads a child not only to Abraham Lincoln but to layers and layers of icons representing myriad other subject headings and sub-headings. Though Kid's Catalog at first offered ten headings in correlation with Dewey Decimal, it has since expanded, mostly in answer to focus group problems (Busey and Doerr "Kid's Catalog" 54). Here, therefore, is a real point of study for icons in Kid's Catalog and also the place where many problems-not least that of culture-specificity-arise.
Before I enter fully into discussion, I need to mention that the searching pathways in the interface, characterized by the icons, are "fully customizable" (Busey and Doerr "Kid's Catalog" 54). To quote Busey and Doerr, "the Kid's Catalog includes tools which allow librarians to easily build search paths to match specialized requests, curriculum needs, and collection strengths" ("Kid's Catalog" 54). For instance, in the new web interface, Kid's Catalog is customized to the needs of a Texas library and there is an icon solely for special Texas interests that is absent from the original Denver interface. With this in mind, I must point out that the most complete version of Kid's Catalog that I have available to me is the Denver version and that that library has made use of its option to customize the icons. CARL and Kid's Catalog, therefore, are not entirely responsible for problems such as the same icon repeated in subject headings or subheadings: lack of imagination on the part of the library is as much to blame. It is less likely, since there is an Icon Library of over1000 images, that there was a lack of variety from which to choose (Busey and Doerr "Kid's Catalog" 55).
This said, however, I will dig deeper and be more critical of the icon designs, for which Carl and Kid's Catalog are responsible. The second most basic level of icons-those linked to the Explore/globe icon on the main page-cover subject categories on everything from Famous People to Kid's Problems. There are several icons with specificity and power of evocation of the caliber similar to the first page's keyboard and medal: the Religion icon contains a menorah, a cross, and other symbols which are both inclusive and evocative. The Sports and Games icon is almost as good, on a par with the globe's quality, as it features a collage of sports equipment, but it is all baseball: a cap, a bat and ball, and a glove. This is not likely to be completely unfamiliar overseas, and a soccerball or equipment from other sports might have made a more universal icon. Soccer is, after all, a more widespread sport than baseball. The majority of the icons linger about this caliber, doing very well in providing specific images that evoke the words or subjects they are intended to represent-in particular, the King Tut mask for History or lungs and intestines for the Human Body-but not displaying the universality a collage of several varied objects might. Perhaps, for History, a smaller King Tut mask, a Roman in a toga, and a timeline across the bottom of the icon.
Farther down in the subject layers, Kid's Catalog has an easier task, for the subjects the icons are already more specific: an Aztec temple or Peruvian Inca garment can stand for the tribe indicated, or a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. can lead to the books solely on that man. Though this is the area where most icons are repeated-the same Native American symbol used for generic and specific categories-a question here is the age of the user: will a kindergartner, foreign or American, recognize an Inca feather when he or she sees one, unless he or she lives in Peru?
The icons that frankly disappointed me are interspersed throughout the layers of the interface, but the easiest ones to find are the ones in the top layer. Generally, the problem icons of the "robot" caliber are either much too culture-specific or not evocative enough. Of the former, the Halloween Jack-O-Lantern and the ghost with the goony grin are among the narrowest in scope. If a child user only looks at the Jack-O-Lantern image, he or she will assume, if understanding at all, that it links to Halloween books. Clicking the button, however, the child will discover that Kid's Catalog and the Denver library are using the icon as a symbol for all Holidays. Halloween is not even universally celebrated across America. It is almost as ambiguous as putting an American Revolutionary soldier from the Fourth of July on there and expecting it to evoke "Holiday." As for the ghost, though every continent has ghost stories, it is still potentially confusing because of its Hallmark card appearance. It has a cartoonish grin and yet it is intended as a link to scary stories. Someone from another culture might not even identify this ghost as a ghost, as they might not identify the Simpsons and human beings.
I have mentioned the use of the collage more than once in the course of this discussion, and in the end it is my strongest recommendation. The Kid's Catalog icon I considered the greatest success-the Religion icon with its Jewish and Christian and Hindu symbols-was an example of what I mean. For another, a bowl of something that could be soup, stew, or rice, an ear of corn, and an apple might form a collage of kinds of food into an icon which, no matter where the user was, would evoke the idea of food. Considering the scope to which Kid's Catalog aspires, and the girth of the world, it seemed to me in practice that a collage of items might be the most practically universal way to go about icon design.
As it stands now, and as it moves into expanded availability on the Internet, Kid's Catalog is perhaps one of the most well designed tools on the market. Having taken a close look at the prototype Web version of Kid's Catalog, however, one of the things that worries me is the comparative lack of icons. The block letters are still there, and the basic icons on the main search screen-keyboard, globe, etc.-but farther down in the layers the links are lines of text instead of pictures. Whatever problems I might have with some of the pictures, tiny lines of text are not an improvement. What the CD ROM icons have done, for whatever users they target, they have for the most part done well, and they are a definite keeper for the Web version. To conclude, I would agree with Sandlian who tells the story of the ten-year-old boy who recommended Kid's Catalog with: " 'This shows me everything I need to know, and where to find it.' "("Rethinking" 25) but who also adds, "The Kid's Catalog is only the beginning…" ("Global Village" 25).
Works Cited
Busey, Paula and Tom Doerr. "Kid's Catalog: An Information Retrieval System for Children." Journal of Youth Service in Libraries 7 (Fall 1993): 77-84.
--. "The Kid's Catalog." Colorado Libraries 19 (Fall 1993): 53-55.
Edwards, Owen. "Susan Kare." Forbes ASAP 161.4 (February 1998): 106.
Newman, Wilda. "GUI Icon Standards for Bibliographic Databases; U.S.-Scottish Joint Project at IFLA." Information Outlook 1.12 (December 1997): 9.
Sandlian, Pam. "Kid's Catalog: The Global Village Deciphered." Colorado Libraries 20 (Spring 1994): 23-25.
--. "Rethinking the Rules: the Story behind Kid's Catalog." School Library Journal 41 (July 1995): 22-25.