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The best icon is a text label

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Re: The best icon is a text label

#101

Post by josho »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #84
derefr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you only have to learn it once. Just like the hamburger.

Start button is where you go to start a program. Hamburger button is where you go when you've tried everything else.. I.e. It's a placeholder for random stuff which is why it's bad design.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#102

Post by mjcohen »

Tideflat wrote: post #99
sandGorgon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

"ex dot org"; "ex ef see ee".

At least by me.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#103

Post by zamalek »

On Windows Phone 8.1 the settings screen is "text labels" and is completely unusable. They added icons in 10 and this resulted in a huge improvement.

Text-only is as-bad as icon-only. Combine the two.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#105

Post by Cyberdog »

josho wrote: post #101
Dylan16807 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you only have to learn it once. Just like the hamburger.

Start button is where you go to start a program. Hamburger button is where you go when you've tried everything else.. I.e. It's a placeholder for random stuff which is why it's bad design.

> Start button is where you go to start a program.

Or to shut down the computer.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#106

Post by Larrikin »

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.

Have you ever actually studied a language involving "pictograms" or are you just making assumptions? I didn't take Chinese long enough to get a feel for it one way or the other but in Japanese kanji will remain in the language from here until the end of the Japanese language. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and Japanese written completely phonetically is not only extremely long, but once you learn the kanji it becomes much more difficult to read and make sense of a sentence without the kanji.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#108

Post by ipsin »

The best icon is a text label, written in the language of the user? Sure.

But the easiest icon is that weird squidgy thing that looks like a ... well, I don't know, I'm expecting users will click on it and eventually figure it out. Squidgy thing takes maybe an hour to create. The internationalization team's SLA is not an hour.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#109

Post by alejohausner »

zamalek wrote: post #103

On Windows Phone 8.1 the settings screen is "text labels" and is completely unusable. They added icons in 10 and this resulted in a huge improvement. Text-only is as-bad as icon-only. Combine the two.

I always say that a picture, plus a few words, is worth a thousand words.
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