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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

#171

Post by stanac »

alternatex wrote: post #161
vasco wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 10x10 monochrome icons

I don't mind the size, but lack of colors is annoying. If common icons where color-coded, like green to save, blue to download/print/export, red to delete, UI would be friendlier to use.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#172

Post by fainpul »

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…

> You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it […]

This is something visual artists usually learn and are good at and it's not primarily for accessibility, it's simply good design. Accessibility improves as a side effect.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#173

Post by iamcalledrob »

I'm bracing myself for losing ellipses in Apple's menus too.

At least based on the trajectory of macOS's design decline.

For those who might not be aware, a long-standing design pattern on macOS is for menu item labels to have a "..." at the end when a click will take you somewhere, rather than taking immediate action. So you can click more confidently.

It's an example of the subtle quality and attention to detail you get with native UI, that gets lost when you build a web app and re-invent the wheel.

Most "web" UIs don't include this detail, as evidences by the screenshots in the article.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#174

Post by thiht »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #149
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…

So the rule of thumb is that: if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. One of first programs that put pictograms in menus was Microsoft Word. But the way Word did it was entirely different from what we do now. Microsoft Word had toolbars and their buttons, of course, were mostly pictorial. Toolbars could be turned on and off and users…

> thus is decorative. Discard it.

Or keep it since decoration makes interfaces feel more alive.

Not everything NEEDS to be useful

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#175

Post by michaelevensen »

Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#176

Post by VBprogrammer »

omnimus wrote: post #141
ndespres wrote: post #124

I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’…

It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all. The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app). There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have…

The IKEA instructions are generally regarded as a triumph of simplicity. Yet on more than one occasion I've come across cases where a few words in a call out would have prevented having to redo some step after later realising that some features had to be oriented a particular way - the pictures not quite conveying their intention until it was obvious in hindsight.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#177

Post by VBprogrammer »

jameshart wrote: post #82
linguae wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon. It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying. I assum…

I still regard Office '97 as the best UI it ever had. I spent a lot of time inside it, including a couple of years at a bank reconciling corporate actions before I got my first programming job. The ribbon version was awful in comparison.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#178

Post by swiftcoder »

stanac wrote: post #171
alternatex wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> 10x10 monochrome icons I don't mind the size, but lack of colors is annoying. If common icons where color-coded, like green to save, blue to download/print/export, red to delete, UI would be friendlier to use.

> If common icons where color-coded... UI would be friendlier to use

As a colour-blind person, this sounds like accessibility hell. Don't forget your UIs still need to be friendly in what amounts to monochrome

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#179

Post by BaudouinVH »

mixed bag of reactions :

- the part where the reader is invited to guess what a menu item does based on the icon alone was very interesting

- how come the floppy disk survived as as "save" icon when floppy disk use is not the default save medium ?

- has there been any global study (dis)proving that icons and emojis are truly understood and carry the same meaning everywhere on the planet ?

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#180

Post by dsego »

deadbabe wrote: post #92

This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.

Without text can you 100% decipher what each icon in this dropdown menu means and which one you need to pick for the action?

https://imgur.com/a/sTycBjc

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