Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

I really think that icons should be judiciously used, in the event of notification of a serious type. An alert, a warning or an immediate attention to a hazard. Icons have a cognitive overhead of learning it - if we design icons of different styles and artistic expression, they lose their efficiency in cognitive detection. An interface with lots of icons without text (For e.g. SolidWorks, 3DS MAX, Houdini) requires professional training and lots of experience. But a universally recognized icon such as the ones defined in ISO 7010 [1] are popularized and standardized - why? Because, if these icons are standardized, they gain popularity and recognizeability. I am guessing, the cognitive overhead in icon detection and interpretation becomes less as we are constantly exposed to these icons. It doesn’t have to be officially standardized. For example, Floppy disk icon (save a file) and on/off icons. Ofcourse, designers will continue to do things as a statement of artistic expression at the expense of all kinds of things - legibility, accessibility and as I said earlier, recognizeability. But that would make the world a really boring place, so let's allow creativity.

There are a bunch of people that studied semiology of graphics. Frutiger did a lot of work in iconography. Vignilli and a few other

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7010

PS - Btw, skeumorphic design is back, watch out for it in the next decade.

This screen shot from the message/thread view in Gmail illustrates the problems of using icons without text labels when the icons aren't obvious enough:

https://i.imgur.com/k7MFzdK.png

Agree to a point - not all icons are intuitive or well designed. (1) Often well designed icons can bring a sense of understanding or convey function of a tool. However many icons are invented/designed to convey an esoteric function that doesn’t exist in standard non-digital tools. In some cases a text description could be equally as useful but it might take up more room in an interface. Often a iconed toolbar creates a more intuitive interface for users whose focus is on creating images or manipulating complex data. Icons and a well thought out workspace differ from a CLE, but allow users with differing levels of understanding and experience to create useful documents and processes. Personally I think Autodesk is a company that profits primarily on user training for unintuitive software, they also seem to change their products to require relearning and sell certification.

The point about Houdini, Max, and Solidworks needing deep training is ridiculous, a French horn only has 3 or 4 keys, so all players should be able to achieve proficiency easily. However in music, (and 3D modeling) deeper concepts exist to create meaningful and diverse compositions. (1) Icons are a recently modern idea - the 1964 Tokyo Olympics employed them to bridge language barriers. Today icons/pictographs are used in almost every interface and wayfinding (signage) device around the world.

Skeuomorphic design is a good concept to help users understand general concepts. Advanced users who have a grasp of computing are more apt to interpret abstract icons and use them as time savers.

> PS - Btw, skeumorphic design is back, watch out for it in the next decade.

I think it was seen as cool for some people to talk negatively about skeuo, because it brought clicks. Most of these blogposts criticizing skeuomorphism never understood what it was about at first place, and it has nothing to do with how much bevel/emboss or drop shadow a UI has. Realword users like skeumorphism because they want some familiar UI, not some abstract/minimal thing that looks good only in Dribbble...

I do like the idea of a standardised set of icons for user interfaces. Beyond a certain set of core elements, which isn’t very large – search, cancel, arrows, settings – icons tend to only really serve a purpose after they are learnt for whatever specific application. Having a quasi-official set might help in making UI iconography more universal. Then of course allow creativity on top of that. To some degree this is already the case, but having a body add some rigour to these de facto conventions would be nice.

I've used 3DSMax for two decades and I wish they would replace all the buttons with text. How do you design a button that describes the idea of a "bias"? Well they tried and I still don't get it after all these years.

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