Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best icon is a text label

thomasbyttebier.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 213 posts

Re: The best icon is a text label

#131

Post by e0 »

joshuak wrote: post #42
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 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…

"Streaming is available in Safari, and through the WWDC app."

It's 2015! I didn't think 'Best Viewed with Internet Explorer' was a thing anymore.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#132

Post by mrlyc »

I have two modes of thinking when I use a computer program: text mode and graphics mode. I am in text mode while I am reading or writing. I find icons confusing as I have to change from text mode to graphics mode to figure out what the icon means.

The only time I prefer icons is when I am already in graphics mode while using graphics software.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#134

Post by Larrikin »

samastur wrote: post #127
Larrikin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I actually have studied Japanese for a while and have no clue what you are describing as extremely long. In hiragana you have 48 letters for sounds which in most cases are a consonant + vowel. Hence Japanese written in Hiragana or Katakana is shorter than it would be if it was written with a western alphabet. Japanese is probably not the language with shortest words, but neither are they exceptionally long.

Romaji is not in use for the most part in Japanese. Romaji would of course be much longer but I was talking about a sentence written out in only kana vs a sentence written out normally with a mixture of kanji and kana.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#135

Post by mariusmg »

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…

And Windows 95 had to run on 4 MB of RAM.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#136

Post by ajanuary »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #82
CamperBob2 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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?

From your link, "pictograms" are glyphs that depict the objects they represent (for example, 下 directly depicts the abstract concept of "down"). Egyptian hieroglyphs, in their ornate form, clearly depict various items like reeds, birds, arms, and snakes. But those glyphs don't actually refer to the reeds, birds, arms, and snakes they show; rather, the ancient Egyptian writing system is largely alphabetic. Their forma…

My understanding is that they were both, depending on context.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#137

Post by mchahn »

Cyberdog wrote: post #105
josho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Or to shut down the computer.

That should be "Start to shut down the computer". (grin)

Re: The best icon is a text label

#139

Post by yconst »

com2kid wrote: post #39
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. 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…

>Our brains have this giant section dedicated to nothing but recognizing characters in our native written language. Sure we have a lot of brain power going to shape recognition in general, but character recognition is so incredibly trained in our heads that it should be our go to.

Yea, but you still have to read them, i.e. focus this "machinery" on a single word/sentence. So you're working in sequence when trying to identify a bunch of unrelated labels. On the contrary, you can probably differentiate an entire group of icons just by a glance in their direction (provided they are appropriately designed, of course).

Plus reading speed is pretty much the same no matter how many times you repeat the task. Recognition on the other hand improves with repetition.

If you're using only text, you're pretty much stuck with being able to differentiate your icons either by location or by actually reading them. Icons add another component to this.

Totally agree with the color-related comment though.

IANANS btw, so your mileage may vary.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#140

Post by joveian »

makecheck wrote: post #37

The best icon is one you can opt-into. Don't eliminate them. For instance I liked OS X's original toolbars, in that you could easily shift between modes that displayed text or did not display text. (Then they entered their phase where toolbars couldn't be customized and all icons were the same shape, which is far less sensible.)

I agree; e.g. word processors, photo editing, etc. can have vast numbers of options and at some frequency of use having a bunch of little icons on the screen is a reasonable choice vs. alternative. Having the traditional "text, icons, or text and icons" option seems like a good deal there defaulting to something with text.

I also set up my browser such that half of the tab bar is favicon-only bookmarks; I can very easily get to the few sites that I look at most days or want a reminder to look at. I also use favicons to identify tabs. I remove most of the standard browser icons in the interface and just leave the few I use regularly, so I can remember what they all do.

So maybe it is best to think of icons as visual interface optimization that is best performed by the user. Especially for web sites or default application modes I agree with the author that there should be text involved most of the time.

Post reply on HN