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Comment by cykros | Hacker News Reader

You think it's bad; try working a phone support role where part of the job is helping people navigate around on your company's website. Sure, some of us get accustomed to the "hamburger" and "kebab" menus, but those are far from universally recognized terms.

I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot.

Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."

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The reason is because localization is expensive and tedious and discriminatory.

Every instance of text needs to be dynamic. You can't just write "Text", you need to write "$text" (a variable) and have code that refers to a file containing that word in a given language to replace the variable with. It's tons of upkeep work, and you can never cover every single language known to man.

An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done.

Ironically, in an effort to be global and inclusive we are throwing out all the languages and attempting to replace them with a single, universal iconography.

I fucking hate this trend, but I can understand and respect why it happens. People are fucking lazy and this is the course of least resistance overall.

There are still localisation issues with some iconography having quite different meanings by default⁰ to different populations. Also there is the issue of some iconography not making sense to anyone until it is first explained, though I suppose confusing all your users is at least not discriminatory!

“The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.” -- Bruce Ediger¹

And for accessibility reasons the text should still be there in some form² so the icon is just pushing the problem elsewhere, though admittedly accessibility is often forgotten (or actively neglected) making this a moot point.

[0] i.e. before the meaning of a particular icon in this context is explained

[1] usually attributed to Bruce Ediger, though there is apparently some room for disagreement on that

[2] as a tooltip, which additionally helps those without extra accessibility needs because it shows on-hover³ for them

[3] or long-press on mobile UAs, where hover events are not present

Bruce Ediger must not have kids or his kids must’ve been excellent feeders. Latching is not intuitive to all kids.

> Ironically, in an effort to be global and inclusive we are throwing out all the languages and attempting to replace them with a single, universal iconography.

Meanwhile, there is also the opposite trend to enhance languages[0], supposedly also to make them more inclusive. There, too, the "UX" suffers, though for different reasons (readability, additional grammatical complexity, …).

To follow your line of thought, now I'm imagining a world where, in the interest of both gender neutrality and UX, in our languages we start replacing words with icons. :eek.jpg:

[0]:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languag...

> An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done.

The text still needs to appear as tooltip. So the problem has just moved elsewhere.

Oh they just solve that problem by not having tooltips.

Most major websites do choose to keep the tooltips though. So it appears to me that they aren't really solving the localization problem alluded to in the comment I was responding to. If the localization problem is indeed the rationale behind this trend, then they are just moving the problem behind an obscure mouse gesture. Now we need to hover the mouse pointer on the icons to understand what they mean.

my mother gets confused on her tablet. i seriously had to write a little guide on paper, including that triangle means back, circle means home.. square goes right over her head, so i said just ignore that one.

> The reason is because localization is expensive and tedious and discriminatory.

Just have both then? Text and Icon. Text in either the available localization, or in english if it's not there. KISS.

> An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done.

Which would be tolerable if those icons actually made it clear what their function is. But, increasingly, they don't even try.

You still have this requirement for your users that depend on screen readers… a segment of users which coincidentally are unlikely to appreciate the fancy icon.svg

Not a defense, I'm curious, what does Steve Jobs have to do with this? I always remember the iPhone having buttons with text before Ice Cream Sandwich or so.

Not a defense, I'm curious, what does Ice Cream Sandwich have to do with this? I always remember Ice Cream Sandwich having been a version of Android or so.

;)

Jobs is pretty notoriously a design OCD type. And he made a widely successful product that is often copied.

These types tend to hate "ugly" things like text over "pretty" things like icons. And minimalism above all else.

Beautiful is form over function. Just ask the military, who makes ugly, but very functional things.

It's a weird idea that Apple Products are somehow the antithesis of the Military, but as a metaphor it does raise some interesting points.

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