Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

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> You have to teach the user what the icon means.

Recognition speed presumably goes up with familiarity. I have Age - 6 years of experience reading, I have far less than that with whatever icon you come up with.

Let's take starting an app as an example.

On my Smartphone I use the email client "Nine". I probably open up the app manually (versus tapping on a notification) about 5 or 6 times a day.

It took me ~3-5 months of use to be able to look for the icon first versus looking for the text. Note that this is WITH keeping the icon in the exact same place on my home screen the entire time.

So that is what, 450 impressions for, well, no real speed improvement.

In a sea of words, a good icon can help an app stand out. But I'd argue that a good textual name helps more.

If you have multiple products, having your company name start off the title of all your products just means I cannot find your product in my alphabetized app list.

Changing app names is another huge problem. Google's constant re-branding of how I send SMSs on my phone has been very unconductive to me remembering anything. Half the messaging apps out there have the same type of icon (a speech bubble), the textual names make them unique.

That said Facebook cheats by calling theirs Messenger. :)

Also, enough blue icons. Stop it. Everything is one of 3 shades of blue, gross color differentiation kicks in WAY before shape matching does. The three easiest apps to find on phone are the three apps that still have "out of fashion" black icons.

> Icons are like visual acronyms.

I disagree that the analogy is 100%. Our brains have this giant section dedicated to nothing but recognizing characters in our native written language. Sure we have a lot of brain power going to shape recognition in general, but character recognition is so incredibly trained in our heads that it should be our go to.

> I have Age - 6 years of experience reading, I have far less than that with whatever icon you come up with.

When I mean icons are a language, I literally mean that they're a language, in that there's a lineage and history of these languages.

For example, I bet you have decades of experience recognizing the 3.5" diskette 'save' icon, and a similar familiarity with the landline phone receiver as symbolizing 'phone'. These are icons that are part of a shared language, so it's safe to say that using them will be instantly recognizable, despite the fact most people don't use floppy disks or landlines anymore.

If a company decides to use a new icon that's not easily recognized, it's like trying to introduce new language; it has to be done smoothly, otherwise most users will not understand what it means. This is not a problem unique to icons; it's a problem across languages.

If I had a new command-line tool that, instead of `./cmtool --verbose`, I implemented `./cmtool --consult` or `./cmtool --magicify`, you'd have to `man cmtool` in order to understand what the commands mean. This is because '--verbose' is a flag that's common oft-used enough to be understood, generally, what it means, while 'magicify' or 'consult' are ambiguous and rarely used. This confusion has nothing to do with the nature that the UI is text-based (vs. icon-based), and everything to do with the fact that user interfaces, like a language, involves shared conventions.

> character recognition is so incredibly trained in our heads that it should be our go to.

This is also a problem. You cant avoid reading text when its presented to you, so extra text makes the page cluttery, and hard to find the text you really want to read. It is very useful to replace an ever same-looking label for an recognizable icon (Like "Close", "Open", "Save" etc).

I don't think you're correct. Yes, you can't avoid reading text, but you spend far less effort reading it than you would trying to decipher icons, which you also can't avoid doing if you want to know how to use the program.

>Our brains have this giant section dedicated to nothing but recognizing characters in our native written language. Sure we have a lot of brain power going to shape recognition in general, but character recognition is so incredibly trained in our heads that it should be our go to.

Yea, but you still have to read them, i.e. focus this "machinery" on a single word/sentence. So you're working in sequence when trying to identify a bunch of unrelated labels. On the contrary, you can probably differentiate an entire group of icons just by a glance in their direction (provided they are appropriately designed, of course).

Plus reading speed is pretty much the same no matter how many times you repeat the task. Recognition on the other hand improves with repetition.

If you're using only text, you're pretty much stuck with being able to differentiate your icons either by location or by actually reading them. Icons add another component to this.

Totally agree with the color-related comment though.

IANANS btw, so your mileage may vary.

> If you have multiple products, having your company name start off the title of all your products just means I cannot find your product in my alphabetized app list.

Oh great, now I'm flashing back to hunt-and-peck through the Windows XP Start Menu trying to find a particular piece of software in a list categorized sometimes by company, sometimes by software, sometimes by built-in Windows category. An absolute mess.

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