Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Laundry symbols make no sense

uxdesign.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 237 posts

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#22

Post by philliphaydon »

p1mrx wrote: post #14
Izkata wrote: post #6

Speaking of bad design, who thought it was a good idea to blink the labels in the animation, immediately after saying half of people asked knew none of the symbols?

Here are the frames with text: https://imgur.com/a/cP52BPP

Thanks for this. I thought I noticed an error and was able to see.

The 70/60 degree temp icons both say 70 in the text below. :D

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#23

Post by replygirl »

phailhaus wrote: post #19
hulitu wrote: post #16

> Laundry symbols make no sense So I redesigned them, with all due respect. Another failed GUI designer. If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them. Why repeat the Windows GUI experience ? I get that the first phones were slow and doing things in Java didn't help and recognizing that the GUI is crap would not help with market adoption, but let's not pretend that Material design or reinvent…

> If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them The thesis is that they don't work, at all. I have to look them up every time because they are absolutely inscrutable today. Laundry symbols are rarely looked at for most folks, so they have to be maximally communicative. It's not good enough if the only people that know what they mean are those that deal with them constantly.

No post body was provided.

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#24

Post by jerojero »

As someone else points out, it would be best if these were included in the washing machine in some form. Printed somewhere. In reality these icons are quite good and once you know the "basics" it is easy to know which one stands for what, so I think in terms of design they are actually quite clever.

In fact, now that I've seen the meaning of each one of them I think I might start to recognise them better :)

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#25

Post by hoosieree »

What's the big deal, these are all very intuitive:

    no triangles
    adidas
    square
    one squared
    new document minus
    equality
    pig snout
    squaring the circle
    an eye looking through a square hole
    square minus
    do not square the circle
    iron
    iron.
    iron..
    iron...
    iron deficiency
    n/a
    please fill in the entire circle or your answer will not be counted

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#27

Post by secretsatan »

detritus wrote: post #9

Within a second of seeing the 'improved' ones I spot what is, to my mind at least, an immediate failure - the detail resolution is far too small. It doesn't account for the printing limitations on small fabric tags, never mind the ability of old fogeys such as myself to be able to squint that hard and actually read them. I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supp…

I know a few of the symbols, mostly to check if I can actually stick the clothes I'm buying in a washing machine or if they are effectively a single use item (for me). After checking I can wash them, the most important value after that would be the temperature, which is no longer readable. I say that, but I stick everything at 30 anyway... (Alright, some things I know are safe to wash at 60deg, like bathroom towels, so they get the extra heat)

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#28

Post by bigtones »

kgermino wrote: post #7

Some of these are better (the bleach one being the most obvious) but most of them are worse or neutral. If I don't know what a line under the washing machine means, how am I supposed to know what the 2nd button means. The line is at least more visible. It's similar for the iron. Maybe dots as temperature isn't obvious, but it's about as clear as the thermometer, is easy to read, and matches the icons on the iron itse…

The original dry-clean and do not dry-clean ones are the most confusing for me. A plain circle is somehow meant to represent dry-cleaning ?

Re: Laundry symbols make no sense

#30

Post by ThinkingGuy »

For me the biggest problem with laundry symbols is that they're often printed so small that after a few washes they become too blurry to recognize.

Also, while I can feel with my hand whether water is "cold," "warm," or "hot." I honestly have no idea what the actual temperature of the water in my washer is in degrees Celsius.

Furthermore, I live in the US (which is not where any of my clothes are made), so there's the added step of trying to convert the degrees from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Post reply on HN