UXPA Boston Conference 2015

No one knows that the floppy disk means save. At least, that's what the campus librarian insisted when she reviewed the website I worked on for her university. I had done research on just this issue, proving that over 100 college students could identify what the floppy disk meant, but it wasn't enough. New students are always coming in, she said, much younger than the ones I polled. So I went back and surveyed 526 high schoolers to find out definitively: Do teenagers understand the outdated tech in our icons? The survey says yes. But beyond answering her question, I learned a lot of other interesting things about the way younger users interact with the web. 

Some of what we’ll cover:

Visual language builds off metaphors from the past, just like spoken language

Users don’t always need to know an icon’s origin -- context can help them