also known as Mystery Meat Navigation
The best icon is a text label
91–100 of 213 posts
Re: The best icon is a text label
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
(a) they're not pictograms and (b) hieroglyphs worked for thousands of years.
(a) Yes, they are ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... ). (b) So why'd the Egyptians stop using them? What makes them right for today's needs?
We stopped using them because we changed the language we speak due to external factors like being conquered and dominated by foreigners who brought their language and writing system with them.
It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#93I 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…
> Even Facebook is using text,
The problem with the text-only approach is that you can't change the layout or the names of the functions visible to the user in your app or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user.
But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly taking into account that we humans are better equipped to identify pictograms and shapes than text very quickly and efficiently.
PS: Assuming a conventional method or approach to this problem and not a hybrid or innovative one.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
what I am saying is that once your app is using multiple languages, is available in multiple geographies this "just use labels" stuff goes out of the window.
Cancel becomes what, "Zurücksetzen"? "Abbrechen"? All longer strings, good luck with your tiny button.
Not even mentioning Mandarin or Japanese yet.
Oder aber das ist einfach Enterprise-Software Problematik und die Consumer-App Afferl spielen weiter mit ihren Zehen.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#95> 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. Recognition speed presumably goes up with familiarity. I have Age - 6 years of experience reading, I have far less than that with whatever icon you come up with. Let's take starting an app as an example. On my Smartphone I use the email client "Nine". I probably open up the app manually (versus tapping on a notification) about 5 or 6 times a day. It took me ~3-5 month…
> If you have multiple products, having your company name start off the title of all your products just means I cannot find your product in my alphabetized app list.
Oh great, now I'm flashing back to hunt-and-peck through the Windows XP Start Menu trying to find a particular piece of software in a list categorized sometimes by company, sometimes by software, sometimes by built-in Windows category. An absolute mess.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#96The fundamental problem with icons is that they can mean so many different things, as the example with washing shows. I've heard this summed up as "a picture is worth a thousand words, but you don't want a thousand words when one will do." I don't use Apple Mail, so this is an example of what a completely new user --- albeit one who has used computers for a long time --- thinks when they see those icons along the top…
"It's a closed envelope. Mail? Send?"
On web sites, it used to be "send mail to site operator". Now it's "spam this page to someone else so we can monetize it."
Re: The best icon is a text label
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
(a) Yes, they are ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... ). (b) So why'd the Egyptians stop using them? What makes them right for today's needs?
We stopped using them because we changed the language we speak due to external factors like being conquered and dominated by foreigners who brought their language and writing system with them. It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
Oh, OK. Those damn foreign imperialists again, always oppressing our hieroglyphics.
I'm out. This thread is 200TB of crazy on a 10TB drive.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#98For someone who follows HN somewhat, I really don't keep up on any current cool-and-hyped stuff. I'll just see websites become more and more useless with three-stripe icons for menus and then just random mysterious icons, and I'll tell myself that that no doubt these no-context meaningless icons must be derived from whatever iphones are doing this week.
Today, I went to log into Evernote on the web. My password manager fills out the registration form, of course, but it won't submit because it wants an email address, not a username. So I go hunting for the "log in" option. Is it one of these attractive green buttons? oh, no, those are also sign up buttons. Is it in some weird corner like Tumblr for some reason? Nope. Maybe it's after this sales junk? Nope, just scrol…
"My password manager fills out the registration form, of course, but it won't submit because it wants an email address, not a username."
Big UI pain: sites that are not compatible with browser-stored login info.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#99I 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…
+1 This is a huge issue with open source software - everything seems to be named Libre- these days and I haven't found many Americans who can pronounce it...let alone people in China or India.
There is a tendency to make names that are okay for print but hard to pronounce like X.org or XFCE.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
We stopped using them because we changed the language we speak due to external factors like being conquered and dominated by foreigners who brought their language and writing system with them. It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
Oh, OK. Those damn foreign imperialists again, always oppressing our hieroglyphics. I'm out. This thread is 200TB of crazy on a 10TB drive.
I'm afraid that the only one not making any sense on this thread is you. We didn't drop the use of our indigenous writing system in favor of that of the Romans or the Arabs because we thought that theirs are superior than ours, we dropped them because we were conquered and dominated and we had to adopt the cultural norms of the invaders.
Also, you're EXTREMELY overestimating the individual agency of the ancient Egyptian in this matter. Most of the citizens of ancient Egypt were illiterate and only a certain class or caste had the privilege to be able to read and write but the rest of the population were completely oblivious to those icons and therefore your argument is just baseless.