Even worse, Windows now has menus with only icons and no text.
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
81–90 of 340 posts
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#82I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.
I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.
This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#83His example of great icons from Finder is stolen directly from the Rectangle app. Looks like Apple shamelessly took Rectangle's icons.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally. Oh wait, I mean not literally?
Arguably.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#85There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on? One of the things I'm seeing in some of these…
The trend towards monochrome, unhinted (blurry) icons certainly doesn’t help.
Yeah and the Amazon color schemes aren't exactly amazing for contrast either.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#86Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#87There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on? One of the things I'm seeing in some of these…
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#88From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal. Also, I disagree with: > This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought: > Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt…
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#89> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#90Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Enough.