Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmsnell | Hacker News Reader

> there are no icons. Civilizations had lots of icons, and eventually we got the Roman alphabet which I believe is a huge step forward. So, for links I just use words in the Roman alphabet

icons continue to be a form of universal language around the world for helping people to navigate where they need to go: this way to the bathroom, that bathroom has changing table, no smoking in this area, stop!, play/pause, radioactive, scald-danger, tent-camping, etc…

they don't communicate without ambiguity but they do serve a very functional and well-appreciated purpose for rapidly communicating information which would otherwise require more words and more thought.

adopting familiar icons around a website and providing a way to remove any ambiguity can enhance the experience; eliminating them altogether is somewhat of an overreaction

View on HN

The advantage of iconography is that it doesn't require to you use a single language. Many signs in the US, which is largely monolingual, tend to be very wordy. In places like Canada, where bilingualism is mandatory, it's easier to do a cigarette with the red slash through it rather than have two signs, one that says "NO SMOKING" and the other "PAS DE FUMER" (that said, they sometimes do have the latter situation).

It's fairly well known that a lot of iconography is actually poorly understood without prior specific instruction. Do you know what this road sign means: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Zeichen_... ? How about this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Chile_ro... ?

Your first icon looks like truck with a tank carrying some liquid, maybe water. The second one looks like a net for catching butterflies.

For both, I wouldn't know the context.

For your first icon, it means to be cautious and watch out for tanker trunks that are able to drive over bodies of water, as one of them might take an odd route to transition from driving over the river onto your road.

For your second icon, it means to watch out for windsocks that have been blown off their poles.

I never would have guessed either of those two! Ah, I love the Roman alphabet!

For stop signs, restroom signs, etc. I agree.

But here I am talking about the subject of the OP, Web page design.

Yes, I have finally learned what the icons from Adobe's Acrobat PDF viewer and my favorite Web browsers do, but those are not issues of Web page design.

Looking at Web pages on the Internet and designed by others, usually I have to make at best just wild guesses at what the icons do, hover and wait for some explanatory English text, usually too small to read, or just use the TIFO method -- try it and find out.

I can say that in all my usage of Web pages, I have yet to find an icon on a Web page that I both (A) already understand and (B) have seen on more than one Web site. So, to me, on Web sites, that icons are at times and in places useful is cancelled by the fact that on Web sites the icons are not very standard. Or, for icons, I can't pronounce them, spell them, write them down, type them in, look them up in a dictionary or at Google, etc. The icons are usually little drawings, but usually I can't see the drawing clearly enough to guess what it is trying to represent. There is a icon getting popular that is a rectangle with an arrow through it -- I don't know what it means, and I wouldn't be able to look it up in a dictionary.

In my Web pages, the user interface is supposed to be so simple that any links, e.g., Help, Home, Inputs, Results, need just one very common English word.

Maybe some Web pages really need icons instead of words.

For icons more generally, e.g., for road signs, restroom signs, applications software other than just Web pages, that's a more complicated subject. For some of the icons for some applications software, I believe that some well written technical documentation is missing but needed.

Personally, I always go with icon and text if I can. I will still use a plain icon with no text in a few cases and if it makes sense:

  •For the more universal ones like + and - and trashcans
  •If I am absolutely constrained for space and dont have time to redesign
  •If the target audience can handle it or knows it perhaps

I definitely agree that only icons is a bad design choice in most cases. I would go with plain text rather than a plain icon if I had to choose.

>adopting familiar icons around a website and providing a way to remove any ambiguity can enhance the experience; eliminating them altogether is somewhat of an overreaction

I think that was the point was that icons familiar to almost everybody are quite rare on the internet. Maybe no icons at all may be excessive but from personal taste I find layout and grouping clearer than icons in complex UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com