Another approach

Posted Dec 19, 2014 0:34 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: Another approach by tshow
Parent article: Plug-and-play sanitization of USB thumb drives

People don't like reading.

Give them a screenful of visually-distinct icons depicting recently-connected device classes, and tell them to click the one matching what they just plugged in. It takes (hopefully) a deliberate act of cognitive dissonance to screw that approach up.

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Another approach

Posted Dec 27, 2014 0:26 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

So now I have to decrypt a screenful of icons, and hope that the designer's depiction of "visually-distinct icons" happens to be comprehensible as matching particular USB device classes without a considerable amount of puzzling -- no matter what culture I come from.

Given the history of icon-driven interfaces, I am not at all confident.

Another approach

Posted Dec 27, 2014 2:09 UTC (Sat) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> So now I have to decrypt a screenful of icons, and hope that the designer's depiction of "visually-distinct icons" happens to be comprehensible as matching particular USB device classes without a considerable amount of puzzling -- no matter what culture I come from.

Well, a keyboard is easy, a mouse could be represented by a traditional wired three-button mouse, and a joystick by a relatively modern PS or XBOX controller form factor.

It's with dongles that you have to get creative. Visually, one can't distinguish a flash drive from for instance a bluetooth or wifi dongle, their physical form factor is just too similar. Bluetooth and wifi have their standardized logos; as for a flash drive, how about a high-density 5¼ floppy disk drive with the write-protect notch uncovered? ;-)