In the modern era the use of pictographs has become Chinese's Achilles' heel: the hanzi are not sortable. The very things that define the Chinese are what makes it stupidly difficult to get computers to grok the language.
Consider all the icons used for "print" as if the letters P R I N T are unclear. Even for non-english speakers, it's trivial to look up the word in a dictionary, and impossible to look up the icon. Ditto for replacing "ON" with |. It's just madness.
> and emoji.
Perhaps their recent appearance in Unicode, and the several screens of them that appeared on my iphone texting app.
There's more than one ordering of the radicals, and choices to be made when characters have the same radical and the same number of strokes
Paper dictionaries are very thumbable though, the current radical is usually highlighted in a way that makes it easy to flick through and find what you need