The best icon is a text label • Hacker News Board

Re: The best icon is a text label

#111

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:14 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #74

jimmaswell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Start button may not be brilliant, but it came about through actual usability studies. Having just the one button drastically reduced the time it took people to find things.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#112

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:17 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #78

rayiner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interru…

The DOS drivers and disabling interrupts applies to Windows 95 too.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#113

Post by altonzheng » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:34 AM UTC

I think companies need to test their UI's with senile people first. Nothing has given me more insight into user experience than watching my grandma trying to use an iPad.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#114

Post by keeperofdakeys » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:37 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #89

In browser UX, you simply mouse-over an icon to get it's tooltip. But screens are big so there's almost always room for labels. In mobile UX, there's just not much room for labels. I don't see why more apps don't use a tap-and-hold approach for showing a tooltip.

I doubt a lot of users would know that you can even do this, as handy as it is.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#115

Post by frik » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

I personally prefer Icon+Text over Text-only. And icon-only is often confusing on websites/apps - it only works if one uses the website/app regularly like the Office Also the recent trend for black and white icons makes them sometimes harder to understand. Colorful icons worked fine, in older Office <=2010 and elsewhere. Though finding a good icon set with 500+ generic icons that fits one needs means taking compromisses.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#116

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:39 AM UTC

I was an original Macintosh Beta tester back in 1983, and I raised this exact same issue. I built all my apps with text + icon buttons and got penalized for it. One of several reasons why an early Mac beta developer left Mac development, not writing code for the OS for a decade afterwards. (PC users were lucky to have Windows 1.0 around that time, and I did well writing GUIs for corporations that wanted better.)

Re: The best icon is a text label

#117

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:39 AM UTC

Discussed at length a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10738891

Re: The best icon is a text label

#118

Post by JupiterMoon » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:40 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #36

roywiggins wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tooltips aren't going to be much help on mobile though.

> Tooltips aren't going to be much help on mobile though. Not today , but if pressure sensitive touch becomes a widespread thing, distinguishing the "hover"/"click" distinction could be a thing on touch interfaces as well -- bringing back some of the depth of interaction that touch has lost with comparison to desktop.

I hope not for the sake of old people everywhere.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#119

Post by brianclements » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:41 AM UTC

pool wrote: post #8

For 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.

I think the first sighting of the hamburger was actually from the flat/sans Google redesign of 2013. It popped up on Android first, then the web apps, then everywhere.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#120

Post by startling » Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 6:44 AM UTC

AdmiralACK wrote: post #71

pinaceae wrote: post #61

Earlier 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.

Who's offended? We're talking about good design.