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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> expand

Sure. I don't know what most of the buttons do on my car's dashboard, because of the "iconitis" disease that has infected user interface design. Unicode has blessed and encouraged this crap. They don't just standardize, they invent icons intending them to replace the phonetic words.

(Apple is kinda schizophrenic on this. Sometimes you'll see "DELETE" as a button, sometimes a trash can.)

I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up.

You can't look up an icon in a dictionary, making it a fundamentally wretched replacement for a phonetic alphabet. Worse, people persistently try to invent icons for verbs and adjectives, which never ever work. Even for nouns, is that scribble a bird, a duck, or a chicken?

My car has a button with something that looks like a snowflake on it. Does it turn the heater on? The defroster? The air conditioner? Turn on traction control? Who the hell knows?

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> Who the hell knows?

The manual.

I see what you’re saying, Gmail is painful to use for this exact reason. I’d argue it’s fine on cars though for a few reasons:

- there probably aren’t that many icons to be aware of in a car

- cars are generally owned for a long time, so learning 2 new icons every 5-10 years is not much to ask

- cost-cutting on I18n: the snowflake could be AC in English but “airflugencoldensteiner” in some other language. It doesn’t scale and it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place.

> The manual.

Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years.

> airflugencoldensteiner

So just use AC. You can even look it up in the index.

> It doesn’t scale and

Yah, show it to an illiterate desert dweller, and ask them what they make of it.

> it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place.

Of course it can be. Whatcha gonna do, translate that entire 500 page manual into hieroglyphs?

Isn't it hilarious that now an entire generation of adults has never used a phone that looks like the typical phone icon? The phone icon on my iphone looks like a phone from the 1960's. However, "PHONE" has remained constant.

>Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years.

You can't also look at index to decipher what it means to see "red light bulb that is 'on' over two light bulbs that are 'off'" or "human figure walking over piano keyboard inside a white triangle which is inside a blue square" when you are driving, you are supposed to get familiar with those symbols before get in the car. Typical car has barely a dozen or two pictograms, and any car is a machine than can easily kill and maim. It would be advisable to look at the manual before one starts driving. Of course, it would advisable if those symbols were also standardized like traffic signs.

I actually agree with you about Unicode mission creep, but it is better not get overboard with pictograms that have nothing to with Unicode.

My old car has controls labeled "defrost", "heat", "cold". I never even had a manual for it.

US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them.

> US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them.

I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true. While I agree with you that iconitis can go overboard, I think pretending that words are universally clearer—in the sense of every place, but also for everyone, not just you—is an exaggeration.

> I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true.

This sort of comment is inevitable. I could say "everyone likes ice cream" and I'd get a comment saying they know someone who doesn't like ice cream. I could say "people have two legs" and there's be comment about someone who was born with one leg.

> This sort of comment is inevitable. I could say "everyone likes ice cream" and I'd get a comment saying they know someone who doesn't like ice cream. I could say "people have two legs" and there's be comment about someone who was born with one leg.

It seems to me that you prove a point against your own argument here. If you said "people have two legs" in an anatomy class, then that would be the wrong place to object. If you said "people have two legs" as an argument against installing wheelchair ramps, then I think that would be the right place to object that some people don't.

Given your other comments in this thread, your statement that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" seemed to be a statement to be taken seriously if perhaps not completely literally, rather than being a casual statement of the type clearly to be understood as loaded down with qualifiers like "on average, in predominantly English-speaking in the US …". I took your argument to be against using icons, even in situations where they might allow non-English speakers equal access to crucial information, and it seems to me to be worth pointing out that universally quantified statements in that setting not only are not true in the most technical sense, but are even likely to be harmful if used to guide policy and decisions.

> Nobody has any trouble understanding them.

People who don’t speak English perhaps.

Traffic signs are something the Europeans did well and are just part of taking a driving license. Crossing a country border won’t mean you suddenly can’t read traffic signs.

Meanwhile in Thailand I find the occasional full-Thai sign I have no idea of what it means. Maybe it means turn left on red allowed, maybe the opposite. Good luck, everyone else.

> People who don’t speak English perhaps.

There's a huge difference between being competent in English and knowing a handful of English words. For example, if I travel in France and stay at a hotel with a french name, am I going to have to learn French to associate the name of the hotel with the hotel? Of course not.

> Maybe it means turn left

The thing is, if the Europeans had standardized on the word "STOP" for stop signs, people would have learned that just as easily as the icon for STOP. Oh wait, they did just that!

(I'm old enough to remember when the Germans used "HALT" signs.)

The USA should become a signatory to the Vienna convention on road signs and signals like its neighbour country. That way, people will have even less trouble. More people comprehend the common, global (pictographic) language than English.

  > Of course, it would advisable if those symbols were
  > also standardized like traffic signs.

The warning lights and symbols necessary for operation of the vehicle are standardized. The only two icons that have different variants across vehicle manufacturers, that I am aware of, are the Parking Brake Engaged icon (which could have an exclamation point or a P) and the Airbag Disabled icon (which has varying levels of body thickness for the depicted human).

Traffic lights have many advantages over icons or text. They are far more reliable than electro-mechanical moving signs, can be seen at night, and can be seen at a much farther distance. The vertical configuration came about because of color blind people. I'm old enough to remember when they were horizontal.

Warning lights are used to draw attention.

It's not an argument for icons.

> So just use AC. You can even look it up in the index.

No, you “can” not, you “must” look it up.

I know what a sun is, I don’t know what HO means, I will have to look it up.

You’re looking at the problem as if there was no language other than english.

Growing up in a non anglophone country I had to deal with plenty of english-only interfaces that didn’t need to be, like ON/OFF.

I agree that bird icons are hard to decipher, but usually that’s not the case for common situations, like for the play, on, off buttons.

> plenty of english-only interfaces that didn’t need to be, like ON/OFF.

Is it really faster to learn what "|" means than "ON"?

> I had to deal with

And now you're fluent in English, while learning "|" was useful only for a switch.

Again, nobody has to learn English in order to know what a handful of words like "ON" mean. You don't even need to learn the alphabet.

> I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up.

But odds are these icons have been there (unchanged) since before the invention of unicode, so that's hardly an example of the "iconitis" you mention, right?

I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc.

Iconitis escaped from the laboratory in 1983, when Apple decided that English was obsolete and we should revert to the language of the Pharaohs. (Well, except that even the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt discovered that phonetics was better, and turned their hieroglyphs into a phonetic alphabet. The Mayans did, too.)

An Apple evangelist came to my workplace in 1983 and gleefully tried to sell the engineers on the idea that a drawing of a Kleenex box was better than the word "print". The trouble is "print" is a verb, and nobody has yet come up with an icon for it in 40 years of trying.

The laundry washing pictogram symbols are an Europe (French) thing from the 1960s.

edit. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginet...

> I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc.

These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet. The standardized icons themselves date from the 1970s, though non-standard laundry symbols are much older than that.

Design use of icons over text has nothing to do with Unicode, it's a natural part of human expression. Icons are everywhere, from traffic signs to laundry symbols to buttons on computers to ramblings signs. I think your reading of the typographical history here is simply wrong, neither Apple nor Unicode is responsible for the "iconiziation" of communication. We've always used icons for communication, and we always will.

If your issue is with Emoji, then you should make that case instead. Personally, i think it's great that if I send an emoji from an iPhone to an Android phone (or from/to essentially any device), you get a consistent symbol, instead of being locked in to whatever your manufacturer was using (the fact that this kind of lock-in was occurring was the original motivation for adding emoji to Unicode).

Btw, laundry symbols are a perfect demonstration for another wonderful feature of using icons: they're cross language. You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.

> These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet.

And yet we get bagels both with and without cream cheese. Says something about Unicode's priorities doesn't it?

> You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.

This argument sounds attractive and inclusive, but it doesn't make any practical sense.

If a cheat sheet is needed to determine what icons mean, one column for the icon and the other with the meaning in the user's native language, what is the essential difference between that and replacing the icons with English words?

Why is it easier to learn what a strange symbol means than the word "print" ? At least if someone is faced with "print" they can figure out what it means by typing it into google or a dictionary. Not so with an unfamiliar icon.

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