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The best icon is a text label

thomasbyttebier.be

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Re: The best icon is a text label

#71

Post by AdmiralACK »

pinaceae wrote: post #61
gburt wrote: post #46

Icons, but not text, can be language agnostic and probably more resilient to cultural variation. Obviously well-recognized icons like arrows fit this property more so than time and culturally dependent things like floppy disks for save buttons.

this english-centric viewpoint of the article really bothers me. no mention of i18n, no language variation. just try using labels with a more verbose language like german. welcome to hell. a good icon works across cultures and languages, allows optimized and pixel-perfect UI.

As someone who speaks both languages fluently, it doesn't bother me at all. The iconography could use some tweaking, but this false sense of being offended is ridiculous.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#73

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #51
dizzystar wrote: post #27

I remember getting into a debate about this subject with a self-described UI expert. It was part enlightening and part frustrating. He failed to see the point that so many of his ideas were US-centric, and didn't make sense in any context outside of English-speaking languages, and to be honest, they barely made sense in English. The author brings up Gmail, which has an icon for "archive" that makes zero sense no matt…

Here's one argument you can use against icon advocates: "The ancient Egyptians already tried hieroglyphics. They didn't work. What makes you think they will this time?" Still waiting for a good answer to this one. When someone does successfully counter it, I imagine the rebuttal will involve Chinese pictograms or something else that has worked well for a while but isn't likely to survive the next thousand years.

[deleted]

Re: The best icon is a text label

#74

Post by derefr »

jimmaswell wrote: post #56
joshuak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the more and more useless progress of web interface design. The hamburger icon (three-strip icon as you call it) being particularly egregious, akin to the travesty that is the 'start' button on windows. However, to be fair, Apple designers are very much against this trend as well (not to defend the recent downturn in Apple UX design). I recommend this 2014 WWDC talk on UX[1]. The entire talk is worth watch…

Calling the start button a travesty is ridiculous. The start menu is a useful and appropriate menu where programs and other shortcuts are listed that nobody really has a problem with outside contrived complaints on the internet that were made for the sake of complaining. The real travesty was the abrasive and confusing replacement they made for it in Windows 8.

You weren't around for the release of Windows 95, I take it. The OS tried very hard to point out that you have to click the start button to, well, start doing things—but people usually just Didn't Get It anyway until someone guided them through the process.

Probably the best thing Microsoft could have done back then was make a little pseudo-video† walkthrough, showing people what's in the Start Menu and what happens when you click on a few of the items in there.

† What do you call a video stored as a sequence of automation triggers for software, rather than as pixels? Are you allowed to call it "machinima" if it's not a game?

Re: The best icon is a text label

#75

Post by spurgu »

The paradox here is that the most effective UI would be one where you'd have minimal "signs" (text or otherwise) telling you what to do. The problem with this is that you'd have to _learn_ how to master it. What we have is a compromise. Something that tries to cater both to casual as well as power users.

I'm thinking about for example a swipe based touch interface. A lot of functions now are click here, then click there, when they could be done in a simple gesture. But the problem is that one would have to learn the gesture somehow in the first place. And people don't read manuals, even if there were any nowadays.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#78

Post by derefr »

rayiner wrote: post #70
CaptSpify wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think "Am I turning into a stereotypical old person? Unable to use a computer?" I always feel like I'm just out of touch.

Rose colored glasses. Remember Win 3.1's inscrutable "staple" icon? What the hell does a "yellow" traffic light mean in the context of Window controls? And don't forget: software was shit when we were younger. Win 9x, Mac pre-OS X. Buggy crap all of it. I can't remember the last time my desktop hardlocked, though Android and iOS these days are similarly shitty to how Windiws 9x was.

It was shit because it had to be, though.

Windows 3.1, for example. It had a very elegant Virtual Machine Manager with pre-emptive multitasking and true process isolation... and then GUI programs were all placed into a single cooperatively-multitasked event loop, because anything else would have killed performance. And the OS also had to continue to support IO device drivers written for DOS—that could disable interrupts system-wide and thus freeze the computer!—because otherwise your (horrible, un-QAed) scanner wouldn't work.

I fully believe that software hasn't gotten much better over the last 40 years. The hardware constraints have simply relaxed to the point that we're no longer forced to make as many Faustian bargains.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#79

Post by chei0aiV »

roywiggins wrote: post #28
rconti wrote: post #4

I always laugh when I see that "unclear laundry icons" image, because I recently had the experience of trying to use a combined washer/dryer machine in a foreign country. The icons truly are asinine, you can't even get close to guessing what you want. For fun, I looked it up. Some of the icons are obvious, a few make sense once you know the basics , and still others seem almost sillier once explained. http://www.text…

I encountered this machine, which had a manual on top, hooray! But it didn't include explanations of any of the symbols: https://imgur.com/Sdwrvqv I ended up going for "40 degrees shirts and pants" since that matched what I was actually trying to wash, but God help anyone trying to use that machine with any specific requirements.

"aws 51012 labels" brought this as the first result:

http://docs.whirlpool.eu/_doc/W10802912EN.pdf

Re: The best icon is a text label

#80

Post by conanbatt »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #47
brenschluss wrote: post #17

> Don’t use an icon if its meaning isn’t a 100% clear to everyone. When in doubt, skip the icon. Reside to simple copy. A text label is always clearer. The article is misguided, in that it assumes that the meaning of an icon only exists in the lines/color/visual form of the icon. Icons are visual language . You have to teach the user what the icon means. Either the user has seen the icon before (such as in airports),…

> You have to teach the user what the icon means Who's in charge here? The software works for me, not the other way around. I don't want to be learning your glorious new UI, I want to be using its essential feature and getting out ASAP. I understand that for progress to be made, ideas must be explored and risks must be taken. But leaving out a label is not progress, it's just someone trying to save screen space on a…

Adding text provides strain as you cant avoid reading text. It also produces huge clutter.

If you replace all the icons for text, you will feel the site looks from the 90's. Try it out on any major site with the browser.

Text label is not a silver bullet.

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