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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

#231

Post by fuzzy2 »

linguae wrote: post #59

I wonder if part of the problem is the lack of color in these examples? I remember Microsoft Office 97 and 2000, which had icons in their menus (albeit only for a few actions, not for every action). However, those icons were colored and appeared visually distinct from each other. Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icon…

Yesyesyes this here. Icons need colors, the smaller the more. Otherwise, they might as well be gray blobs. Peripheral vision works with colors, but it doesn’t do finer details.

rant:

But in the end, user interfaces are mostly “dead” anyway. No more structure, no more colors, no more icons. Everything is a flat sea of labels and boxes (or sometimes even just lines) floating(!) around. And no two user interfaces use the same style, even from the same vendor.

/rant

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#232

Post by mr_toad »

qwertytyyuu wrote: post #130
pjot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar is the save icon, though for a different reason. It conveys its function well, but one first needs to know what a floppy disk even is!

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

My daughter understood what the Chrome icon was for before she could even spell ‘Chrome’.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#233

Post by mr_toad »

netsharc wrote: post #182
eviks wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would indeed be the myth. The reality is what you see on the screen

Hard for Steve Jobs to have done this for the changes of the last ~14 years...

You’ve never seen the movie Poltergeist?

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#235

Post by wartywhoa23 »

ragazzina wrote: post #227
Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. If the text on the button is always the same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. Just use the position.

And if the position is always the same, it is decorative, and we'd pretty much rather discard it too and use time, which does not stay the same by definition, and make them stupids click anywhere spatially but on precise time: t % 2 == 0 => action 1, t % 3 == 0 => action 2 etc - but that would be too much of a disrespect towards users, however stupid - and we have no choice but randomize those iconless textless positions dynamically.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#236

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

michaelevensen wrote: post #175

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,…

I've heard this kind of reasoning from a number of designers, and it strikes me as post hoc justification for aesthetic self-indulgence.

So, with the greatest of respect, I don't believe you. It does not take you "a couple more milliseconds to scan", since a couple of milliseconds is well below human perceptible thresholds for almost every sense.

There is no accessibility improvement here — you just like the consistency.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18465408/

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#237

Post by thiht »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #191
thiht wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thus is decorative. Discard it. Or keep it since decoration makes interfaces feel more alive. Not everything NEEDS to be useful

Classic Mac OS window headers had striped or dot patterns that were kind of similar to rugged parts of various physical tool handles. So they were both decorative in a way and informational: this is a part you can hold and drag around. A typical interface will have a lot of such parts that are both functional and decorative, so it will feel just right. Purely decorative parts are also possible (and even desirable), b…

That’s a very subjective view of design, and I strongly disagree with it. I don’t want everything to be too uniform

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#238

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

1986 wrote: post #36
bromuro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my language “egregious” means “very good”. In English means both very good and very bad. What’s your meaning here? Just to be consistent :)

In practice, "egregious" in English never means very good

This hasn't been my experience.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#239

Post by KronisLV »

I wouldn't have an issue with every menu item having an icon, if we could make every single one different enough to be distinguishable from the others.

The problem is that you only have so many ways to draw the shapes and at your average resolution it ends up looking like "this group of squares with squiggles in them" and "this other group of circles with squiggles in them".

In some cases like a power menu or window snapping menu (like in the Mac Rectangle app) they can be insanely useful, though maybe those are easy to do because the count is kept to a reasonable amount. Maybe there are exceptions where the same icon can be used for multiple items, like in the insert/delete action groupings, to make the group distinguishable from the other options.

But in general, it just seems like the menus have perhaps too many items in them.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#240

Post by Tade0 »

I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:

> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.

I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.

You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.

Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.

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