Amen to the Apple Mail icon problem he mentions. It gets me every time, too.
Ctrl-click anywhere on the toolbar and select either "Icon and Text" or "Text Only". Problem solved!
The best icon is a text label
11–20 of 213 posts
Re: The best icon is a text label
#12I'd love to see some empirical data, but my intuition is that text + colored icon is the ideal (in terms of how quickly you can find what you want) for both new and experienced users. Every little clue helps navigation, and makes me feel more confident about using an application.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#13On the one hand text labels are convenient when you can read them, on the other hand when you can't (say because you're in japan and japan loves the hell out of its text labels) icons you might be able to decipher are better than text you definitely won't.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#14Indeed; I've noticed often while observing people of older generations that one of their big problems using apps today (especially mobile) is that they don't have the same understanding of iconography as younger generations. It's usually not intuitive for them.
Is it really a matter of intuition or just familiarity with the interface? I suspect it's the latter, likely older people you've encountered aren't "early adopters" of technologies vs. their younger contemporaries and simply not yet learned the meaning of the symbols.
OTOH a younger person confronting a piece of "antiquated" equipment, e.g., an old camera where everything had to be set manually might well feel totally lost vs. the old-timer who knows how to use it from prior experience.
It's not really a generational thing, more associated with environment, exposure to the device in question, education and similar factors. It's all too easy to assume everyone else has the same background and knowledge base as we ourselves, but that's in fact rarely the case. When others aren't similar to us, it's not safe to believe their apparent deficits are due solely to factors like age or obvious personal characteristics.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#15Re: The best icon is a text label
#16I'd agree that many Icons are context sensitive and many require the user to learn their use, but they do, mostly, provide a language agnostic approach to navigation. An icon is the same size in any language, whereas the title could be very different.
> I'd agree that many Icons are context sensitive and many require the user to learn their use, but they do, mostly, provide a language agnostic approach to navigation. They are "language agnostic" in that an icon system is its own language .
And it sometime appears that almost every icon system
is its own special snowflake, unique more for its creator's
convenience, with more creativity than reusability.
The result is more like having dozens or hundreds of different dialects of Esperanto - each system intends to be rational and useful, but the overall effect on users of multiple icon systems is more like cacophony than expressive consistency.
OTOH, the core challenge of using text labels is finding texts that work and are meaningful and reasonably consistent across dozens of written natural languages.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#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), or if the user hasn't, your UI has to accommodate that.
Once that happens, then icons are way faster.
Icons are like visual acronyms. The sequence of letters 'T', 'C', 'P', 'I', 'P' means nothing to someone who doesn't already know what 'Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol' is, but once you do, TCP-IP is way faster to recognize, speak, type, and to share.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#18For 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 always think "Am I turning into a stereotypical old person? Unable to use a computer?" I always feel like I'm just out of touch.
I guess we gain perspective. We have the stereotype of old people being cranky and stupid (like I come from the era of cd-rom cupholder jokes, faxing images of floppies, etc.), but probably there were intelligent old people out there telling us about missing context and we didn't listen or by its nature what they had to say couldn't get press or something.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#19I'd love to see some empirical data, but my intuition is that text + colored icon is the ideal (in terms of how quickly you can find what you want) for both new and experienced users. Every little clue helps navigation, and makes me feel more confident about using an application.
When I see a pushback against icon-only buttons, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the mobile space is changing so rapidly that things don't have a chance to "settle down" like they did for previous technologies.
I mean, I don't think it's inherently obvious that a triangle pointing to the right means play, a square means stop, and a circle means record. However, it didn't take cassette players and VCRs to be out that long before everyone knew what they meant. In that case, I think having more info (like the text 'Play') is unnecessary.
In the mobile space, I feel like there is pushback because it's also not immediately apparent that 3 horizontal lines means "menu". I wonder how long that will be the case, though.
Re: The best icon is a text label
#20Non-text icons is one of the reasons I don't use IDEs all that often. I'm always wondering "damn, what did that icon do again?" or "I wonder where I can find the button to run this thing" but then I click the wrong thing sometimes and totally screw up my layout then spend a while looking for another button that will get me partially back to the way I was before I can even start looking for the button I wanted again. I guess I would get used to it eventually but it bugs me.
(I'm looking at you Eclipse)