The Importance of Avatars
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008The offline experience
There is a feature of Mac OSX that’s fairly underrated: the usage of avatars throughout the system. The benefits of maintaining those small images are become apparent subtly:
That’s just a small area of my two-screen setup but probably the part I work with the most. I configured Adium that it displays rather my own avatars than the messenger’s ones. It got much easier to figure out who’s online without even glancing on the names.
Avatars online
Let’s take a look at the web… (at my favorite social app)
Okay, apparently the benefit of recognizing contacts without reading the actual name. People change their profile as often as it causes the application to list their profiles higher than others.
What’s the deal then?
Some pages extensively use avatars (taken from mashable)
Do you see the benefit? It certainly isn’t the one I stated. When picking avatars randomly users just can’t match them with their contacts, especially if their “friends” change them hourly.
But: many avatars (and icons) can improve the impressions a basically dark page leaves. Or just look at photo pages like flickR; nothing but user generated graphical elements.
To a much greater degree, the merit is rather a psychological one: To the user the site shown above makes the impression of vividness, showing the presence of a boatload of users, just waiting to get in touch. If there’s the opportunity to get your user’s (or friends’) avatars, use them to create a better experience on your desktop or even your social network.