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

Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 340 posts

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#241

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Personally, I don’t like to use icons in menus. I do like them in tab bars and toolbars. I’ve learned (the hard way) to be sparing about using icons. Way back in the 1990s, I designed a scanner driver plugin that used an almost purely iconic interface. Looked great. At the time, I was gaga over Kai’s Power Tools[0].

Our customers hated it, and it was quickly taken behind the woodshed, and buried in a shallow grave in the desert.

Icons are really difficult.

Designing icons is really hard. They need to be immediately recognizable, when very small, and also, retain coherence, when made very large. They need to be recognizable, when displayed as transparent, monochrome templates, and they need to be culturally relevant.

In some cases, there may be legal ramifications for icon choices. For example, branding. I remember someone complaining about Apple rejecting their app submission, because they changed the tint of the Sign in with Apple button to match their color theme.

Selecting from a set (like SF Symbols) takes a lot of thought. I have to be careful not to use one that is already a common icon for something other than the feature I’m attaching it to. I often see apps that make weird choices.

One of the apps I wrote, uses a “long press to learn more” feature. If you long-press on almost any item in a screen, you get a haptic, and a small popover appears, displaying the accessibility label and hint. Works nicely. Ensures that I have good accessibility support, doesn’t interfere with other gestures, and also forces me to be thoughtful about accessibility text.

Kind of a pain to implement and maintain, though. I don’t do it in most of my apps.

[0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#242

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

mock-possum wrote: post #146

It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else. But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here: > You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right. That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, b…

> A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.

Ok, but not by intuition. This is learned pattern recognition, which started with seeing those icons adjacent to text labels.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#243

Post by dsego »

trinix912 wrote: post #216
dsego wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They didn't say to have no text, they just said icons are still helpful.

They did say that "an icon is worth a thousand words" and that "people barely read text". Why is it helpful if you still need to read text? I understand that some icons are instantly recognizable, but these are really small and the black & white shapes look rather similar.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#244

Post by vasco »

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.

Monochrome is a strange complaint, the text is also monochrome. Regarding what most people think I don't know, I'm definitely faster at spotting a specific pictogram in the start of a line than having to read multiple lower information-density pictograms (alphabet characters) in order (reading a full word or sentence). This seems obvious to me, 1 thing is faster to parse than multiple things.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#245

Post by icoder »

20k wrote: post #183
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…

Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform. It lets you skip reading all the text when you're familiar with a dialogue, and you can short circuit what you need to click on without having to read That's the reason why pictographic additions are so useful. Its the reason why we dis…

What may be added is that some people have a hard time reading words by their 'total shape'. I can imagine that for them, the difference between pattern matching symbols and strings of letters is even more profound.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#246

Post by lavataco »

nntwozz wrote: post #105
watersb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First we lost the pinstripes, then brushed aluminium; then we lost colors in the sidebar icons. Then they made everything flat. Finally we lost the background and legibility. Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve. We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.

Surprised it took me this far down to see him mentioned.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#248

Post by lavataco »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #44
DeathRay2K wrote: post #4

I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links. There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.

It's kind of a shame how we keep trying to make icons look uniform, either in color, or in shape. Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors. Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almo…

Google has been universally panned for using their logos as app icons. I think most people in this thread are talking about UI vs app icons (essentially avatars for apps at this point).

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#249

Post by lavataco »

nmilo wrote: post #15
DeathRay2K wrote: post #4

I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links. There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.

+1. I love icons, just be consistent. That MacOS example is egregious

Yes, just consistently line them up and it would be fine. There’s plenty of UX research saying icon+label improves recognition and task speed. NN Group is a good resource for this.

Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

#250

Post by marginalia_nu »

lavataco wrote: post #248
marginalia_nu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a shame how we keep trying to make icons look uniform, either in color, or in shape. Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors. Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almo…

Google has been universally panned for using their logos as app icons. I think most people in this thread are talking about UI vs app icons (essentially avatars for apps at this point).

Visually uniformity is a broad trend that affects both areas. The monochrome line-art UI icons that are used everywhere are every bit as bad as Google's app icons.

Here are some icons I screenshotted off a website. I challenge you to tell me what they mean

http://www.marginalia.nu/junk/icons.png

http://www.marginalia.nu/junk/icons2.png

Hint: „ǝsıɹdɹǝʇuǝ ʎɹʇ„ sı dn oʇ ƃuıʇuıod ʍoɹɹɐ ǝɥʇ puɐ „sǝsıɹdɹǝʇuǝ„ sı ǝqoʃƃ ǝɥ⊥

Post reply on HN