Priority Icons thoughts

Posted by Nadia Mahlow on September 11, 2007
Filed under Design | 8 Comments

I searched on the web and came across the "priority road sign", so I based my new mockups around this sign.

Through my web research  I came up with the following.

  1. Priority Critical - Exclamation Mark (!) or two V pointers going north
  2. Priority Important - Single V pointer going north
  3. Priority Medium - Single V pointer going south
  4. Priority Low - two V pointers going south

 These are the priority icons I had in mind.




Below is the Status Icon merged with various priority icons. 

Revamp Mindquarry Combined Status Priority Icons 

Do these icons make sense to anyone? 

 

 
 
Main | spicing up the icons... »
 


Comments:

I'd prefer the second row. The pointers aren't intuitive by themselves, I think (north/south?), but combined with a color it makes sense. However, I'd put yellow before green, so you have red-orange-yellow-green matching a decreasing importance. The second row is better than the fourth, because there's more color and it's therefore easier to distinguish. Maybe try a black border around the importance tags, though. You could use a more visible boundary IMO. This would also yield a better contrast to the white exclam mark / pointers. Maybe also think about the one vs. two pointers south. Two pointers definitely seem more important than one (and they are "heavier" visually), but what you want is the contrary.

Posted by Jonas Witt on September 11, 2007 at 05:46 PM CEST #

Hi Nadia, I like the second variant best: having a color-coded background allows seeing the status even at a small scale and the icons for important, low, high and very low are quite self-explanatory.

Posted by Lars Trieloff on September 11, 2007 at 09:08 PM CEST #

I agree with Lars. They all look pretty good, but the second row will scale the best.

Posted by Alexander Saar on September 12, 2007 at 10:05 AM CEST #

Your icons look great and the V going north and south make totally sense to me.

But I also agree with the need of an additional color coding, although I'm not sure whether the traffic lights metaphor is a good approach for priorities.

Red makes totally sense for high priority items, because one should pay attention to them, but what should be the meaning of green then? Somebody else is working on it? This issue solves itself?

I know that, concerning GTD-methodoligies, tasks with the lowest priority should be ignored more or less until they solve themselves. But I'm not sure if this is the intented meaning within your icon set.

I would suggest white instead of green as the last color. This would perhaps give a more appropriate meaning.

Posted by schmidt on September 12, 2007 at 10:35 AM CEST #

Thank you all for your comments.
My attempt was to let the icons speak for themselves.

The traffic light methodology was not intentional, well noted. I will try out different colours and then see which one suits the icons best.

Posted by nadia on September 14, 2007 at 10:27 AM CEST #

hey,
I really liked the priority icons above. Especially, the exclamation mark with red priority. I wanted to use it for one of the website i am creating, is there any licencing fee associated to the using of the icon.

Posted by Sabiha Railey on April 21, 2008 at 09:23 PM CEST #

I like to use your priority icons. Hiw can I get access to them?

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