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Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
251–260 of 340 posts
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#252I think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.
A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.
A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#253The first Google example is a nice one: You could have only one icon for each group (one trash for all the 'delete' actions', one share icon for all the 'share / download' actions, etc). That would be really helpful, for what it is worth. Globally, I had a pleasant time reading this article which was way too dedicated to something that is almost invisible in its current state (ie: I don't notice those icons and surel…
Yes menu item group icons would be a much better anchor: third icon under such and such icon
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#254Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#255This 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.
> ... Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text ...
Then they are wrong. And are bad UI designers following folklore instead of sound ergonomy.
I absolutely hate icons, and parsing and remembering them causes great cognitive load on me. Also, icons like to change with each revision of the apps, with styles etc., and are not uniform across apps. This makes them completely useless to me. Maybe I can cope with an '[X]' to close a window, but that's about it. Even very common functions like 'Save' or 'Add' usually have completely arbitrary and confusing icons. 'Add' is not a long text. It works. I need text. Without any icons. I want to switch icons off so that the text can have maximum space to be reasonably large to be seen and read easily.
People are different is what UI designers should know instead.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them? Icons have until recently always been color coded. That doesn't make them a problem for the color-blind. You can look at the shape of the icons and read the text next to them. Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded? Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#257I 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 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).
In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.
In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)
It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#258Earlier 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…
> 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
No you can’t.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#259This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least,…
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is wh…
Before I read the blog post I would have agreed with you. It's pervasive, well understood, and the meaning is clear which you point out is what really matters.
But after reading the article I find myself asking if that's really true? I'm doubting it now. Certainly, the Floppy disk icon is clear to computer users who experienced at least a few years of the 90's or early 2000's. That's becoming less and less a percentage of computer users. For most users, that floppy disk has receded into being just a nonrepresentative shape associated to save.
I think it's that the blog post convinced me to reject nonrepresentative shapes as icons. You can't look at the extremely illustrative menu filled with icons that clearly describe window management actions or text formatting actions - where the icon itself conveys clearly, if abstractly, exactly how reality will look after you take the action - and tell me that a menu filled with random nonillustrative shapes has even a similar experience. I can't shake the idea that the menu icon needs to be more than just a logo or branding - it needs to be self-explaining.
The floppy disk did exactly the above when floppy disks were where the data was actually saved. But in 2025, we have to accept that it no longer illustrates anything. Today its just a nonrepresentative shape.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them? Icons have until recently always been color coded. That doesn't make them a problem for the color-blind. You can look at the shape of the icons and read the text next to them. Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded? Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
> Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them?
Because pretty much as soon as one starts colour coding items in the UI, people start using the specific colours to encode meaning. If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon in your UI twice, congrats, you just lost 8% of male users!
> Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded?
If they weren't colour-coded, they would have to be differentiated by shape, and then when I traveled to Canada, I wouldn't have to guess whether the fancy horizontal traffic lights are ordered left-to-right or right-to-left
> Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
Even fully colour-sighted folks can't see red very well at night, so yes, white car > red car