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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see some empirical data, but my intuition is that text + colored icon is the ideal (in terms of how quickly you can find what you want) for both new and experienced users. Every little clue helps navigation, and makes me feel more confident about using an application.

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When I see a pushback against icon-only buttons, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the mobile space is changing so rapidly that things don't have a chance to "settle down" like they did for previous technologies.

I mean, I don't think it's inherently obvious that a triangle pointing to the right means play, a square means stop, and a circle means record. However, it didn't take cassette players and VCRs to be out that long before everyone knew what they meant. In that case, I think having more info (like the text 'Play') is unnecessary.

In the mobile space, I feel like there is pushback because it's also not immediately apparent that 3 horizontal lines means "menu". I wonder how long that will be the case, though.

I feel like the hamburger button is a special example, since the fact that your mobile app has a "here's where we shoved the features we couldn't fit in anywhere else" menu is usually a smell that you have deeper design issues at the information architecture level.

Hamburger button? Is that what people are calling the three lines button? I think that's one that will catch on. I didn't get it at first, but I think now it's here to stay. It also isn't necessarily a sign of bad design. I think it's mostly used as the "main menu" on a small mobile screen interface where you typically use the majority of the screen for information display. Not a bad design at all.

Or you know... it's a symptom of needing a menu.

I'd much rather apps include a menu of extra features that don't quite fit into their interface paradigm, rather than omit them until they can find the One True Interface that can incorporate them all.

Or even worse, make the common case harder just so the interface can include all the features.

I only have an anecdote, but: I've discovered that I have no ability to differentiate between icons while working. On my own computers, I use WMII, a minimalist tiling window manager; that is: text and no icons. Before that, I'd used "traditional" window managers that showed the icon and program name in the bottom bar (Gnome, Vista, XP, 95). Anyway, at my last job, IT decided that the computer on my desk should run Windows 7, which only has the icon in the bottom bar. It was totally unusable to me; if I was working on something and wanted to switch windows, my brain would never know which one to click; more often then not, I'd just try clicking on each of them until I got the window I wanted.

> Anyway, at my last job, IT decided that the computer on my desk should run Windows 7, which only has the icon in the bottom bar.

It's generally a good idea to look through the settings or search on the internet if you don't like something on your PC.

Windows 7/8/8.1/10 all allow using labels and text for the taskbar buttons.

I don't think it was meant as a complaint about Windows as much as it was an anecdote about icons vs text.

I was forced to use Windows 8.1 recently and had a similar experience - I decided to go with icons-only to see how long I could stand it before I got used to it, or reverted to icons+text. I reverted after a few days because it was really difficult to find the right button. Even icons for apps that I'd surely have seen and used many times, like Visual Studio, were much slower to find amongst the ~dozen others without the text.

The other real irritation comes from the fact that the selected button no longer has a "pushed in" effect like Windows Classic used to have, but only a very subtle colour change (and the colour varies depending on the colour of the icon too... so instead of just one "active" colour for everything, I now have to figure out what each app's active colour is to find it quickly):

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-d...

This has been considered industry best practice for quite some time, and there are studies proving effectiveness (although I can’t cite them at the moment). However, the current design trend is minimalism, and we're stuck with that for awhile. It will eventually adjust itself back to a new baseline normal, somewhere in between.

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