Every day, millions of us perform a small, almost unconscious ritual. We find a file, a program, or a folder. We right-click. We scroll to "Send to." And we select "Desktop (create shortcut)."
Smith invented the "icon" (from the Greek eikōn , meaning "image" or "likeness"). He argued that a small picture of a trash can was more intuitive than the command DELETE . A folder that looked like a manila folder made more sense than LS -LA . place icon on desktop
But search requires you to remember the name of the file. The icon requires you only to recognize the picture . For our visual brains, recognition is much faster than recall. Every day, millions of us perform a small,
Plop.