RE:Industry stats (stats?)

["Carnall, Jane" <Jane -dot- Carnall -at- compaq -dot- com>]

>We're over here in a non-English-speaking country
>designing a website in English and fighting the
>battle of words versus graphics.  If we put 
>the concise term "stats" on a link button, on a 
>page describing the industry we serve (website
>administration), will it be obvious to a 
>computer-literate but otherwise general 
>readership what "stats" stands for?

Continue the fight. Put "Statistics". Your audience may not know what it
means, but at least it's a real English word that can be looked up in a
dictionary... which "stats" is not.

I'm very dubious about the idea that you can design easily and universally
understood graphics to convey complex abstract ideas (like "statistics").

One instance I remember from a previous job, the designer wanted to convey
(for an international audience) the concepts "Stop" and "Go". The graphic
for "stop" was the traffic sign for "no further" (red circle with a bar
across it). The graphic for "Go" was a set of three lights, red-amber-green,
with green lit.

These were graphics using symbols recognisable within the designer's
culture, but not necessarily outside it: and there was no reference book to
look the meaning of each symbol up in. (Other graphics were even worse (it
was a large billing system: can you imagine how to represent "Invoice a
Customer" graphically?)

Whereas a dictionary is nearly always available, and "statistics" always
means "statistics", when a complex little graphic of spreadsheets and graph
lines will mean whatever the designer meant it to mean. Humpty Dumpty rules
(an example of a symbol from my own culture...).

Jane Carnall
Technical Writer, Compaq, UK
Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine alone.