Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.

It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.

I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?

I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links.

There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.

Two extensions/patches I'd like to see for macOS:

1. Remove all icons from menus.

2. Make mouse-over do nothing - I should be able to move the mouse anywhere on the screen, and nothing should change colour/pop out etc.

I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.

I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.

From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."

Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.