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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

#161

Post by alternatex »

vasco wrote: post #155
Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #143

Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake. (It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first tha…

I disagree, pictures are easier to remember than words and I'm much faster (several hundred miliseconds) at quickly spotting an icon in the 12th place down a list and clicking it because I memorized it visually than reading the actual words. So icons make power users faster. It's not "clutter". Your argument about "don't use it for aesthetics" is ironic because you're making it because of aesthetics. For me it's abou…

>I'm much faster at quickly spotting an icon

Using the label-less example in the article with the 10x10 monochrome icons I doubt many other people feel the same.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#162

Post by eviks »

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…

How can you remember the underlined "i" when it's so tiny and also positioned in random places? These should be in their own column just like a checkmark or an icon (but yes, no single key navigation is way worse than bad icons)

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#163

Post by tvbusy »

dmayle wrote: post #125
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…

I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page). We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people: 1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons. I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with t…

Sounds like me: 1. For new UI/tool, I depend on text to navigate. 2. Once I'm more familiar, I scan using icons first then text to confirm. 3. With enough time, I use just icons. 4. Why the ** do they keep moving it/changing the icons?

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#164

Post by Zardoz84 »

yokljo wrote: post #132
qwertytyyuu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, people especially younger ones associate the floppy disk with the save button

A lot of apps people use these days are cloud-first and automatically save all the time, so there's not even a save button to have a floppy icon for! The icon to say that it's synced looks like a cloud, and if you're using a web browser it'll probably have a Download button with a download icon. No floppy disks in sight. I wouldn't be surprised if there's computer users out there that wouldn't recognise the "save ico…

I disagree. Not all it's "autosave on cloud", and some apps keeps having an explicit save something button or option.

I recently had a discussion about replacing the "save icon" (IE. the old floppy disk icon) for an icon with an arrow pointing down, for a button that saves (don't download!) a custom query of the user in the system. Perhaps it could be replaced with another icon, but not by someone that everyone would think is "Download".

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#167

Post by eviks »

sixtyj wrote: post #11

Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk? In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all. Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items… It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.

Easy customisation / sharing is the gate to heavens out of that hell, but the lid on the designer' pot is too thick so the don't even notice

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#169

Post by anal_reactor »

watersb wrote: post #67
hinkley wrote: post #23

There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on? One of the things I'm seeing in some of these…

macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes. No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines. https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/ Frankly it's senseless. https://www.flarup.email…

MacOS was never fun. I've been using MacOS at work for five years and it's never been fun nor intuitive. I always explained this to myself "that's because I grew up with Windows" but three months ago I switched to KDE on my private machine and it's miles ahead of MacOS. Just a week ago I got a new company Macbook and the UX is even clunkier than before. Shit just doesn't work.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#170

Post by iamcalledrob »

fireflash38 wrote: post #18

When only some things have icons, it's almost like a flag that these things are more special/useful/used. I think that is by far more useful than everything having an icon that you have to think about (or see the text next to it) to understand

This has been my take too.

The thoughtful inclusion and exclusion of icons in menu items builds hierarchy. When every item is special, none are. You've lost the ability to differentiate.

Icons everywhere is a hallmark to me of "webby" UI.

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