Perhaps we are witnessing a early shift toward ideographic writing
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
91–100 of 340 posts
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#92This 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.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#93Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk? In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all. Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items… It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#94My best guess for the sparse icons in older MacOS versions: icons only for frequently-used menu items.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#95> 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 ne…
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#96I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
But someone got lazy and all the "Delete" or "Add" icons are identical... There's probably a ticket somewhere to "improve the icons" being ignored..
But that's the point. The icons help you find the "delete" section.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#97Look how they massacred my boy
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#98From 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…
I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).
Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.
Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.
But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#99I 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…
Isn't the Apple Menu basically a start menu though?
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#100The disagreement here is interesting. I'm with OP, icons increase cognitive load for me if overused but can help a lot if there are just a few distinct ones.
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).