Version G

By Jakob Nielsen, May 1995

Adding the little triangle to the What's happening bar really made a difference with respect to clickability. In the previous design, users never clicked on the bar, and now they did so quite often. This version made the triangle look a little too much like something sitting on top of the button rather than as a control element engraved into the button, so we changed the triangle a little in the next two designs to make it look more like the label on a physical button.

By now, we were almost there. We still had a little trouble with the Technology and Developers icon, with people complaining that the thunderbolt looked too much like lightning striking the machinery and destroying it. We finally decided to get rid of the references to electricity and in the next design we represented the concept of development by a CD-ROM. We also had trouble with the building on the Corporate Overview icon: some people still thought that the stock chart line looked like Sun's corporate headquarters was suffering earthquake damage, and others thought it was a fever chart. We decided to simplify the icon and stay with the concept of the headquarters building without any embellishments.

We had made the globe icon round, but our attempt to make a literal world to represent the concept of world-wide computer networking was still not fully successful: about half the users did recognize the icon as the world but the rest referred to our globe as an astronaut in a space suit, an olive, and "a golfer trying to hack his way out of the rough," so given the small size of the world icon, we decided to use a much more stylized design for the final icon in the next iteration.

The flaming coffee cup seen here was just a placeholder drawn over the weekend and we replaced it with a more polished illustration in the final iterations.