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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words. Also having each widget take a lot more space forces the designer to really think about the value of adding one vs hiding it.

Multilevel menus are IMO definitely better. If the app is a real productivity app people will spend ages in adding an ability to add "shortcuts" to some most often items will provide power users with ability to reach them quickly.

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It's almost an irony, given where they're deployed, but icons are an interface which favors the expert over the beginner.

iOS has terrible discoverability, you'd think Apple could afford to release a detailed manual, but once you've figured out what all the icons and gestures mean and do, it's fluid.

A better example is any photo or vector editor you've ever used. They all have tons of icons, all over the place, and if you want to use them, you do need to figure out what they mean. Even with keyboard shortcuts, the selected tool is indicated with the icon.

Programmers are heavily biased towards using words for everything, it's a strength in the context of the profession. The "any text can be selected and run as a command" interfaces are a dead end, but I'm in favor of revival, it's a great match for the kind of work we do.

But if you give an artist a drawing tool with only "Tool→Lasso→Magic Lasso" as an interface, they just won't use it.

iOS has terrible discoverability

Absolutely. I really don't understand how people think that making controls invisible is in any way useful, or user-friendly. To me, the worst is "We just showed you this big screen of options. But we're not going to show you that you can search the options if you drag the screen downward to reveal a search bar. But you wouldn't think to do that anyway, because pulling down on a screen is the Refresh function in other places."

you'd think Apple could afford to release a detailed manual

It does: https://books.apple.com/book/id6443146864

but once you've figured out what all the icons and gestures mean and do, it's fluid

Yep. How to do something in iOS n is not how to do something in iOS n+1.

By the time you read through Apple's 74 page manual, you have a new version of iOS and have to start over again.

I'd rather spend time with my cat and my family than re-learn every piece of tech from every giant tech company over and over again.

> It does: https://books.apple.com/book/id6443146864

I wish I was joking: my first iPhone was a 4, and you're telling me this for the first time.

Did I mention that discoverability is terrible? I'm sure that URL was printed in tiny gray text on that tiny piece of paper you always throw away first...

On the bright side, I'm going to read it. Thanks.

I'm sure that URL was printed in tiny gray text on that tiny piece of paper you always throw away first

You are correct. That's exactly where it is.

Or maybe was. Because I don't remember seeing it this time with the latest phone. Maybe it's not even there now.

Maybe it's in the Tips app now.

It used to be available as a PDF, but I could only find it in Apple Books.

> Did I mention that discoverability is terrible?

Apple does also include the Tips app, with notifications for it turned on by default. In previous iterations if you read all the tips for your new phone, it would point you to the iPhone User Guide; now it’s just at the bottom if you scroll all the way down and you don’t have to read it in Apple Books anymore.

iPhones have a lot of new features every year, so I find it helpful to go through the Tips app at least once every new OS release and also every phone purchase and I usually learn a couple of new things by doing so.

It's Apple-think. I showed someone I know (who used to work at Apple) my SailfishOS phone, and this was before iOS added gestures to manage apps. SailfishOS had those "pull down to minimize" and so on gestures before iOS, and when he tried them out he said they were terrible UX because they were hard to discover.

As soon as iOS added them, they were the future of mobile UIs.

The whole flicking 'cards' to manage apps thing was from WebOS.

Flicking cards was the absolute best part of webos. It was irrationally entertaining.

What made it great was the Palm Pre’s size made it so ergonomic to hold the phone one handed and manipulate the cards with the thumb.

>iOS has terrible discoverability,

I’ve used it since v1 and still don’t know how to do some things reliably.

Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea how I’m triggering it. I mean if it works better than the OG awful copy paste menu I’d be all for it but how the heck is it even appearing.

Don’t get me started on the camera app, can never figure out how to get the flash setting how I want it. It tries to be smart but stops me just setting it as I want. Need apple to trust me when I know long exposure won’t be enough

Every year or two, I figure I really should read up on what new features/changes Apple has added to iOS (or iPadOS) that I don't know about. (And, because I so rarely use, I still never know how to use the split screen stuff in iPadOS.)

Split screen is easy. Tap drag from top middle down and to a side. App takes up less than all of screen if app supports it. Anchor it to a side. Tap another app. Done. Not intuitive at all, though.

Right. That's sort of my point though. When I haven't used it in 4 months, I forget and can't figure it out without looking it up.

Its so stupid, because on a mac for touchpad gestures they have these nice demonstration videos built in. They have what could be a great model for this documentation already.

iPad OS frequently pulls up a file list that I am not sure where it came from that is extremely hard to dismiss (no close box and obvious gestures are mockingly not effective). I eventually get rid of it and forget how. The whole process makes me feel like an 80 year old facing DOS.

> Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea how I’m triggering it.

iOS 13 added a whole set of gestures that all key off of three-fingered interactions with the screen. Just tapping with three fingers shows that bar, which is probably all you're managing to do accidentally.

The rest: three-fingered pinch-closed to copy ("picking up"); three-fingered pinch-open to paste ("putting down"); three-finger swiping left/right for undo/redo... and three-finger double-tap for an undo shortcut.

Totally agree this is undiscoverable, but it's also fairly well gated behind a single root gesture so once you understand the trigger it's memorable.

Wow thanks. Yeah no idea that was a thing. Think I remember seeing the bar during WWDC and assumed it replaced the existing one.

A cheat sheet or a tutorial like the OG Mac mouse tutorial would go a long way.

In my experience artists using complex software actually prefer text labels to an endless sea of icons. High-end visual effects software tends to use text buttons.

Twenty years ago, when there still was competition in high-end 3D packages, before Autodesk bought everybody and monopolized the market, there was a race between Maya and Softimage XSI. The latter was generally praised for its artist-friendly UI which used text labels while Maya was icon-heavy and seen more as a technically oriented tool.

Yeah I would love to see references to studies that attempt to categorize these disparate use cases you’ve described. On the one hand, there does seem to be a clear demarcation between an interface that’s facilitating information creation and retrieval versus ones that facilitate more artistic endeavors such as photo and video editing. On the other hand, you have use cases like Autocad which seem to blur the lines.

Read the book “About Face : on Interaction Design” , you are describing different “postures” of application. It’s a must read if you want to stop guessing about what interface fits where. It’s my bible as it were.

Menu’s are beginner level, icons are for intermediates and keyboard shortcuts are for experts. All are necessary.

Tutorials are for onboarding and getting the beginners started.

> iOS has terrible discoverability

I think you mean: a touch interface makes discoverability especially difficult, and iOS doesn't do enough to address this.

> But if you give an artist a drawing tool with only "Tool→Lasso→Magic Lasso" as an interface, they just won't use it.

I just can't fail to remember how every architect absolutely loves the AutoCad CLI.

Words in interfaces are terrible unless a lot of thought goes into localization.

For example, consider an American UI designer creating a 'Save' button. Now, translate the button to Dutch ('Opslaan').

What you'll see very often is that the button is only wide enough for the English text ('Save'), so 'Opslaan' gets rendered as something like 'Ops...', which is obviously a terrible experience.

I just set my computer and phone interfaces to English to sidestep this problem, but not everyone wants to do this.

It's been a decade since I did any app development on MacOS. But I do recall having to create a separate dialog box XIB resource for each language, with different sized buttons.

That's not needed anymore when using auto-layout, introduced in 10.7 if I remember correctly.

Why does the word “save” need to be in a button? The claim that natural language is an inferior interface is up for debate.

I'm pretty confident that "save" is only one of many examples where this issue can happen.

>The claim that natural language is an inferior interface is up for debate.

They only said that it requires much more thought, not that the debate is finished with their comment.

On any Apple platform, that would be considered a serious bug. It shouldn’t ever be a problem in SwiftUI, and you can achieve the necessary dynamism without too much trouble by using layout constraints in both AppKit and UIKit.

Apple's own products do this often. For instance, an instrument in one of my tracks in iOS GarageBand is listed as "Kind...ass". It's supposed to be "Kindergarten Bass".

https://i.redd.it/0ncp6hgad7v91.jpg

> The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words.

Yeah. I've used a Mac for the last few years at work, and I think the Windows task bar is unambiguously superior to the dock. A big part of that is how it integrates text, which just seem to take far less cognitive load to process. With the dock, I frequently have to pause for a couple of seconds and try to remember which inscrutably-styled circle I need to find to open the app I want.

Though a dock interface would probably be better if each app picked a distinct object to use as its icon, rather than the design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).

  > design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).

ive noticed this myself, now that almost all icons after bigsur have the same shape it takes me a lot longer to find anything in the dock / applications folder

this is really frustrating and disappointing to see things like this deteriorate like this and nobody seems able to stop it...

I find your interpretation of the dock interesting, especially because I've never used the dock.

  - I don't use it to launch applications, I use launchpad for that.
  - I don't use it to open files in a given app, I right-click and use the contextual menu for that.
  - I don't use it to delete files, I use command-delete for that.
  - I don't use it to get to downloads, I use the Finder for that.
  - I don't use it to switch applications, I use command-tab for that.
  - I don't know what else it's good for, or what I do instead.

I say this as someone who has used Mac OS X since it launched: the dock is useless to me; I have it hidden, and if there were a way to permanently kill it, I absolutely would.

Same, I make it quite small, put it on the right, and autohide it, and it still annoys me.

To "disable" the Dock — not really: it will pop up sometimes, e.g. when some icon bounces, but anyway — you can

    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide -bool true
    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 100
    killall Dock

Here 100 is how many seconds you will have to keep the cursor on the edge of the screen before the Dock appears. You could set it to 3 or 5 should you need the Dock sometimes but don't want to trigger it by accident.

[Edit: Autohide can be toggled on/off also with ⌥+⌘+D. You can use the combination to show/hide the Dock, paired with a high autohide delay.]

Thanks! Yep, I used to set the delay to a long time, but I gave it up because my post above is a slight lie -- when something pops up in the dock to notify me, I go to the dock to see what the heck it was. That one use case caused me to give up setting a long delay because of how f'ing annoying it is for something to pop up, and then need (I think I set it to) 5 seconds to figure out what it was.

Have you looked at the Acme editor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

Which was inspired by Oberon, which had an entirely text-centric UI, with tiled windows and controlled with a mouse... and no command line.

> A big part of that is how it integrates text

Interestingly, I just looked at my Win11 taskbar. The only text there is "type here to search".

I have a KDE taskbar at the same computer. It currently has a similar number of open windows, all with enough text to understand not only what application they are, but also what I'm doing there. (Except for emacs. Emacs could use some better title texts.)

> Interestingly, I just looked at my Win11 taskbar. The only text there is "type here to search".

I try as hard as I can to keep something as close to a Win 95-style taskbar as possible. I don't use Win11, I know I can do it on Win10.

I tried "combine only when full" mode for a while in Windows 7 and 10, thinking it would be the best of both worlds, but quickly realized that

1. usually I have too much open + the title captions aren't good enough for the tiny snippet that fits to be useful

2. keeping my pinned apps in predictable places is more important than saving a click occasionally

3. if I really want to see all the open windows with their titles, alt-tab or windows+tab works better for this

So I don't miss it on Windows 11, although I don't like the default centered taskbar (sacrificing (2) to move stuff around all the time for no good reason) and change this setting.

Combine only when full worked great on Win7. But Win10 was so wasteful with the startbar space that it became useless.

I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words.

Or at least give me a choice.

I like how many macOS programs let you have both the icon and the name of the icon under it in the toolbar. It's especially helpful when I'm new to a program and learning its functions.

But opening something like Photoshop or Affinity Photo or Illustrator that I only use maybe once every few months, and it's all hieroglyphics.

And Photoshop makes it worse by piling multiple functions into one icon. So flood fill and gradient are the same icon, and box and circle are the same icon; so the tooltip is useless.

Oh, no, Adobe does it even worse than just a tooltip.

Rich tooltips! Big fancy full-color tooltips! That still don’t really show you how the feature works, and also doesn’t explain there are more features under that icon menu. That obscure huge chunks of the icons next to them, and are patronizing and annoying to seasoned users.

https://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/rich-tool-tips-ph...

And to be fair, the 1984 Macintosh relied on text far more heavily than icons. The trash can even said “Trash” underneath it!

What Jobs wanted to build was indeed radically different from Raskin’s vision. But many of the underlying ideas and principles (“No modes!”) were preserved to valuable effect.

“No modes” was Larry Tesler, not Raskin.

I know, but it’s a principle that Raskin endorsed & you also see in the Cat.

Icons reinforced with text are amazing, because people can learn what the icon is, and then you can reference without text at times when there isn't enough room.

And if it's not cryptic icons it's undiscoverable actions or swipes... How come all the lessons of UI design that were known in the 90s got so completely forgotten?

I wonder how the standard is at these sort of software shops. If the SV dev/designer can navigate through the app then it's good to go? I don't know...

But users can grow accustomed to what an icon means over time right? It happened with the floppy disk icon, the notification bell, open folder, etc. If you start it out as [icon][description] for the first few iterations wouldn't the user eventually learn to associate the icon for the action?

That only works if icons remain consistent and reasonably detailed over long periods of time. Nowadays all icons are abstract, monochrome shapes. They are similar enough to each other, and vary enough from one application to another, that one application's "back" or "new" buttons can look pretty similar to another's "undo" or "copy" buttons. With most apps on my phone I have no idea what the buttons do unless I press them, even if I'm perfectly familiar with the function.

But users can grow accustomed to what an icon means over time right?

Only if you use the same program all the time, and only if that program never changes.

I use Adobe Illustrator a couple of times a year. There's no way I'm going to remember how to do very much from the ten minutes I used it in March to the next time I need it in October. And by then, the process is likely to have changed because the program got auto-updated by the Almighty Cloud™.

I can only learn colorful icons. B&W ones I cannot recognize even after a long time. E.g. right now I'm looking at my opera sidebar and cannot quickly decide which icon is history. Much easier to open O-menu and navigate from there, which is what I always do to erase that last hour. Same for downloads - I know where they are at the top-right corner and I click "Show more" there instead. Can't find it in sidebar without thinking twice.

Btw, I have no trouble using Paint.NET. I just made a screenshot of its UI and turned B&W. Icons instantly became less discernible, and that still with correct shades of grey. If they were this modern outline-abstract bullshit, I couldn't use it at all and would look for an alternative.

For better or worse, the web (and now all the various portable devices we carry around) introduced users to all manner of user interfaces. I think we're a little more flexible now. Or are we a little haggard?

The fewer words you use, the easier it is to localize for other languages, which I suspect is why a lot of things are like this. And a lot of things that don't need localization are probably designed by people who saw all the ones that were created that way and copied them without understanding.

Yeah and don't get me started on "swipe up/down for volume" (VLC on iPad).

The exmh E-mail client frontend used this: https://rand-mh.sourceforge.io/book/exmh/thexmdi.html

Multilevel menus, like drawers in a workshop, hide tools.

At least keep the square, block plane and pencil within easy reach.

Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a remarkable visual memory. Also we can distinguish icons by appearance faster than by words. Also words are language specific, icons... it's more complex...

I can't provide evidence of this ATM but I did do a degree in a related subject.

(I'm ignoring significant visual impairment here)

I once designed an app with a lovely iconic interface.

The customers hated it.

The next release had a lot more text.

For one thing, icons tend not to translate well. We're best off using ISO icons[0], but designers hate them, and always insist on reinventing the wheel.

[0] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home

> We're best off using ISO icons

Hm, first time seeing this and not getting any good results. Here are the results for "save" https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png.

Are you sure any of these are meant for a technical context?

The first one is "to indicate the entered data is saved" and it's been registered since 2004. I think it's more in the context of forms and less about saving a modified file.

Never seen it before either.

If you enter "data" instead, you'll get the full context of the only one of those four which is applicable.

I could quibble with some details of how these icons are designed, but I like that read and write point in the same directions as the carets in Unix redirects.

That leaves up for "make data leave this device and go elsewhere", with down for "make a local copy of this data", aka upload and download.

I must confess, however, if I saw the ISO icons in the wild, I wouldn't understand them. This is while already being aware of their existence.

Yeah, their browser sucks.

I have a few collections that I downloaded, that have software-relevant ones.

icon #6177 was bewildering. Apparently it is for "use on equipment" in the "eltrotechnical" domain. Without too much of a stretch of imagination, I can see a graph on an oscilloscope there, but why for 'save' and not for 'print' or selecting the time domain in a multi-function device?

> The customers hated it.

Sigh. You screwed up. You gave the users what you wanted to give, not what they wanted. You must always test & iterate.

> The next release had a lot more text.

Yes, I was too general - different interface needs must get different interfaces. Sometimes icons aren't appropriate, sometimes icons + text is better, sometimes you have to get creative.

> For one thing, icons tend not to translate well

I said that.

> We're best off using ISO icons[0], but designers hate them, and always insist on reinventing the wheel.

That's a flaw in the designers, not the icons then. Are you blaming the icons for that failure?

Edit: those icons don't seem to have anything to do with standard computer desktop UIs AFAICS, am I missing somethign?

I don't understand the hostility. I simply told a story about one of the many "bad judgment" stories that I have encountered, and the lessons learned, therein.

I wasn't asking for judgment.

Was intended as blunt, not hostile (how does it come across hostile?).

WRT 'giving the users what you want not what they want', that's a classic mistake I've made several times and finally learnt from. Hopefully you can get there faster than I did.

I did, many years ago. The story is from about 1993.

> Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a remarkable visual memory.

That's why since some 10 years they change it regularly.

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