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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

#171

Post by detaro »

rmc wrote: post #162
fatratchet wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's ment in the sense that power users are by far the most likely people to disable telemetry or "Send usage data to help improve this software" functions, if such a setting is offered. Especially if the option is buried somewhere deep in the settings menu. Also the most likely users to have adblockers, though that's getting more and more common.

If it's a web app, you can't do that.

Depends. If you use a third-party, client side telemetrics provider it's probably on blocklists. If you track usage yourself on the server or integrated into your JS, then yes, you'll probably get good data.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#172

Post by OJFord » 

  > Facebook as a final example: they lately traded their
  > unclear hamburger menu icon for a frictionless navigation
  > that combines icons with clear copy. Well done
No, not well done. They went from almost conforming to the OS' (on Android) design guidelines, to totally ignoring them.

The 'hamburger' button is not "unclear", because it's so commonplace that at the very least it has an intuitive meaning in the context of an Android app - it's where I expect more options, settings, etc. How do I know that is now kept behind the much less clear icon that seems to show a man moving quickly?

Re: The best icon is a text label

#173

Post by ta0967 »

rmc wrote: post #162
fatratchet wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's ment in the sense that power users are by far the most likely people to disable telemetry or "Send usage data to help improve this software" functions, if such a setting is offered. Especially if the option is buried somewhere deep in the settings menu. Also the most likely users to have adblockers, though that's getting more and more common.

If it's a web app, you can't do that.

if your user tracking is served from a 3rd-party domain, you won't see me or my family members in your stats. ublock, ghostery, requestpolicy. aggressive settings.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#174

Post by forgottenpass »

potatolicious wrote: post #59
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…

> "UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user."" In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap. Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed…

In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap

I've never understood how the concept of "UI" ever evolved to not encompass usability at it's core.

I was happy to cede UI territory to the designers who said they'd do it better. Even when I was insulted to my face that because I'm a programmer and liked my arcane typing based interfaces for myself, so therefore I couldn't possibly understand making usable software for others. I bit my tongue, put my head down and went back to the things I wanted to focus on anyway.

In the time since, user interfaces have experienced gradual incremental improvement just like everything in computing. But rather than going for "nothing else left to take away" design (or perhaps due to a shortsighted version of it) visual clutter was just turned into mental clutter. The number of WIMP nouns and verbs the average user has to understand are higher than ever, with less consistent behavior, and overflowing with one-off slightly different implementations to remember.

Rather than any grand improvements, I've only seen degenerate phenomenons for making user experience worse. My favorites being: A well-managed brand name, good aesthetics and software reputation means that when someone (eg. Apple) ships a bad interaction, users that would (rightly) blame the software first before working around it, start blaming themselves first for "not getting it". Or that products evolving quickly (such as the early years of Facebook) are bewilderingly unusable to people that don't log in often enough to keep up with the UI changes as they happen in small increments.

Then after waking up from their bender the UI folks start talking loudly about UX. I thought that was the goddamn point all along! Oh, but what do I possibly know? I only have formal training in what we used to call Human-Computer Interaction, and I quite like my console shells. And shells have bad aesthetics, so they must have bad ux too. And at least the UI guys managed to get 1 of the 2, I guess I'll just go back to holding my tongue now.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#175

Post by icc97 »

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…

I've been worrying over clicking archive vs delete for ages in Gmail now.

Even though you've always got undo I'd much rather not have to click undo.

I let out an internal comforting sigh once I realised I could just replace the icons with text.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#176

Post by marcosdumay »

kqr wrote: post #147
JFlash wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment. This reasoning is probably intuitive to anyone who's familiar with a logographic writing system. I feel like you can also draw a parallel with programming languages. Consider: def sum1(array) sum = 0 array.each { |e| sum += e } sum end def sum2(array) array.reduce(:+) end sum2 isn't just a different way to write the same thing. It's a construct that expresses a specific pattern of evaluation and aggreg…

> red means cancel/go back/stop/error. This is something that was learned, not something that was known by instinct. Well...[1][2] There are some precedents for red being a no-go colour even in nature. Which is likely why we use it as a stop colour. It would be interesting if someone knows of a significant number of cultures that use it as a "go ahead" colour. I mean, the samples are probably skewed because everyone…

Transit lights were standardized during the XX century. You won't find a place that uses them differently.

But there are cultures where red means good things.

Re: The best icon is a text label

#177

Post by ada1981 »

Wait, I've been googling gcal for the last 2(?) years when my calendar tab needs populated when I could have just been clicking on the chessboard thing in gmail??! I was wondering where the hell gcal went!

>> Google decided to hide other apps behind an unclear icon in the Gmail UI, they apparently got a stream of support requests, like “Where is my Google Calendar?” <<

Re: The best icon is a text label

#178

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

emblem21 wrote: post #142
gotchange wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Egypt…

Colonial conquest is not the primary methodology of linguistic propagation. Trade is. English is the primary programming language, not because a team of dedicated Anglo-Saxons are pointing rifles as the head of brown people, but because American trade provides the most profit motive between 1974-2008.

On the other hand, if not for the previous several hundred years of western europeans pointing rifles...

Re: The best icon is a text label

#179

Post by marcosdumay »

userbinator wrote: post #83

The 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…

Most of those are pretty standard on phones.

- Closed envelope: No idea - Compose - No idea either - Delete - Reply - Reply to all - Forward - Flag. The meaning of this changes, but not the overall idea.

The problem is, WTF are those doing in an desktop application?

Re: The best icon is a text label

#180

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

sandGorgon wrote: post #90
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…

+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.

More than that, Libre- is a very inward-facing name. It's not AwesomeOffice, FriendlyOffice or PowerfulOffice. It's "LibreOffice", something that simply doesn't make any sense to most English speakers.

The implication is "we choose this as our adjective, because we care more about our ideology than the quality of your user experience". Ok, the ideology says that "because we build our software like this, you get a better user experience", and I have a lot of sympathy with that. But by the time you have to explain the name like this, you've lost the potential user's attention.

(OTOH, I also suck at software naming so probably shouldn't preach.)

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