Toolbar Buttons Revisited…

 

My 9 year old nephew was making a Powerpoint slideshow today. I watched him regularly saving his slideshow using the menu and asked why he was not using the Save button, to which he replied, “Which one is it?”.

I looked at the toolbar and saw a button with a picture of a floppy disk. I don’t think he has ever seen a floppy disk in his life. I’m not surprised he didn’t associate this button with saving his slideshow.

I’ve seen articles suggesting that buttons with icons are not good for new users. This is especially true if the icons reference old technology they have never encountered.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

 

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

3 thoughts on “Toolbar Buttons Revisited…”

  1. Oh, now you got me started on kids and Powerpoint. I had hoped that the practice of schools getting kids to develop powerpoint presentations for homework was an insanity confined to America, but alas not. It makes me furioius that they are forced to chop their thoughts into tiny corporate bullet points, and that they spend five times as much effort on formatting and arranging their text as they have done on the truly educational and creative part. There seems to be no thought of getting them to actually write a coherent set of ideas in an essay.

    And then when they lose it because they forgot to save …

  2. It’s in Australia too. My son, turned nine on Saturday, has had to do a couple for school. But they are teaching grammar rules too. My daughter (six) has now started raising issues with the reading stories she brings home from school. It really puts you off the flow of a story.

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