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Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#111

Post by Arch485 »

sbarre wrote: post #103
quamserena wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.

Is this just your belief presented as fact, or do you have some data to back this up? (Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").

Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p

Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#112

Post by trollbridge »

drdeadringer wrote: post #71
0manrho wrote: post #43

From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal. Also, I disagree with: > This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought: > Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt…

After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.

What isn't so helpful though is the classic Google Sheets example where it has three different options (Delete Row, Delete Column, etc.) but all with an identical "trashcan" icon.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#113

Post by chungy »

linguae wrote: post #54
dexwiz wrote: post #3

I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.

I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.

Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#114

Post by DonHopkins »

antonvs wrote: post #108
DonHopkins wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could care less! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457 https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarretthe...

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-le... I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.

If you're a fan of de-emphasizing your agency with the passive voice, then you can say "less could be cared for by me" or just "less could be cared for" if you totally want to totally avoid responsibility for not caring.

I loved MrHeather's comment (who worked with Weird Al to animate Word Crimes):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823632

MrHeather on April 9, 2020 | parent | next [–]

When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.

In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#115

Post by abustamam »

Timwi wrote: post #89

> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus? Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future. (Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it ne…

I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.

They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#116

Post by itake »

I think this is true, if you can read in the language.

Its really difficult to help someone on tech issues if their device is configured for a language you don't understand. Simply changing the language is annoying, b/c then they can't understand the workflow I'm showing them in their language.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#117

Post by crabmusket »

I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.

At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#118

Post by abustamam »

arcbyte wrote: post #2

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,…

I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#119

Post by petesergeant »

drdeadringer wrote: post #71
0manrho wrote: post #43

From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal. Also, I disagree with: > This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought: > Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt…

After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.

Genuinely curious if the item types in as shown in the article are that helpful though. They seem small, fiddly, hard to distinguish between, and not especially intuitive.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#120

Post by jFriedensreich »

i hope this is a fringe opinion as im usually putting icons on every item and found it leads to reduced mental overload and fast item selections, for complex menus i would even go so far as making it colored to more senses can be used. the icons have to be meaningful though, apples guidelines specifically mention arbitrary icons not icons at all
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