I remember getting into a debate about this subject with a self-described UI expert. It was part enlightening and part frustrating. He failed to see the point that so many of his ideas were US-centric, and didn't make sense in any context outside of English-speaking languages, and to be honest, they barely made sense in English. The author brings up Gmail, which has an icon for "archive" that makes zero sense no matt…
> Even Facebook is using text, The problem with the text-only approach is that you can't change the layout or the names of the functions visible to the user in your app or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user. But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly taking into…
FYI, this is almost certainly not true. Research suggests that users only recognise a very limited set of icons in an application, and where there are extensive toolbars full of different icons, it is often the position that the user is recognising more than the icon itself. Thus reorganising things like toolbars can have a profound negative effect on usability, and it seems likely (though I'm speculating now) that this would be much worse than something like reordering text items in a menu.