The test: Comparative Test of Public Symbols
“This is an online survey to research the existing public symbols and pictogram standards. In the list each topic or theme has four visual answers, please choose the most easily identifiable sign from the rows.” View test results online.
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Comparative Test of Public Symbols (pdf file)
Comparative Test of Public Symbols (keynote file)
Nice work! But of course, I dare to give some critique :-P You really should include the question asked in the results: “please choose the most easily identifiable sign from the rows”. I had no idea what I was looking at, and how the test was conducted.
Jon Hicks said that this: “Really drives home the edict of “simpler the better’”, but I disagree. A between-subjects test is better fit to draw such conclusions from. I think the most plausible conclusion to make from these results is that signs form a language of their own and that therefore the aiga-symbols people are used to are the most easily identifiable. People are just responding to what they’ve learned over the years.
Nice test results. In most cases I think that the less details (stylized) they are in the icon, the easier people would choose that one and they seem to prefer white backgrounds with black icons instead of black backgrounds with white icons (with which i somehow completely agree). In some cases the comparison wasn’t completely equal since in some icons the word was visible (taxi, change), but those simple words really clearify the icon
To make the differences in gender and geographical response really meaningful though, you should express the results as a percentage & not the actual number. As your data set isn’t balanced between males and females and europeans and americans the skew looks greater than it may actually be.
Thanks for the advices guys! New answers are keep coming. This summary is based on 162 responses and there are 230 new since I posted the results. So I am going to sum this up again considering your point of view. :)
It would be interesting to see if one of the source sets of icons you used was overall more effective than any of the others. (But perhaps you used too many sources to be able to tell that easily.)
Interesting work, well done!
The No.1. AIGA’s DOT’74 is a very well known set especially in the US. But I used many sets because I wanted the most different signs side by side in a row.
Interesting survey; I noticed that in each case my choices matches those of the majority. This confirms that we chose the symbols we were educated with, rather than the signs that we ‘feel’ are closer to us.
For example, the ‘WC’ sign is well-known, even if in other languages the word is totally different. However, the most popular icon is that of a female and a male separated by a wall. Why would men and women be separated by walls? (-; Anyway, I chose “woman | man”, even though “WC” was a lot easier for me to ‘parse’.
Finally, I must point out that my choice for ‘water transport’ was different from the most popular one. My explanation is that I live in a country where nautical transport simply does not exist (my country, Moldova, is a landlocked state). This probably confirms that we choose whatever we got used to, rather than that we find more intuitive.
Where did you get the other sets from? I can only find the AIGA ones online.
You can find them in this book (quite old but definitely useful resource): http://www.tiny.cc/dgv3U
Handbook of Pictorial Symbols:
3,250 Examples from International Sources
by Rudolf Modlay (Author)