Redesigning the hotel icon | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning the hotel icon

blog.cleartrip.com

66 pointscheeaun31 comments

You're better off with the park service icon.

The new design is unnaturally squared off at the foot and the spacing between the sleeper's body and bed results in ambivalence and muddiness.

I agree. I think their new design looks more like a tractor than a person in a bed.

It's a good thing they got rid of that chap's arm, or they would have got a cease and desist from HostelWorld.com

http://blog.keepmebooked.com/2011/09/what-happened-to-our-ma...

If we wanted to use it, is your new bed icon released under an open license?

We hadn't thought of releasing the icon, but we're quite happy to do that for the community to use. We'll try and do that shortly.

This new icon is definitely much easier to see at lower resolutions, nice work. Can you talk about the choice of using the bed icon versus a hotel-building icon that e.g. Hipmunk uses? http://www.hipmunk.com/hotels

MaxGabriel -- this is a bit of a subjective choice. We chose to go with the "bed" approach over the "building(s)" approach for two reasons:

1. We think the extensive usage of the original bed icon in wayfinding signage around the world makes it something that most users have already "learned". Most people take that icon to be representative of hotels since they've already seen it so many times.

2. We debated the building approach, but we thought it may get confused with the "home" icon. And we didn't want to use icon+text in our design at this stage. We think the buildings approach gets even more confusing without a text label.

As I said, however, it's a bit of a subjective choice...

The hotel-building icon to me looks too ambiguous. Is this representing a city? An apartment complex? An office building?

I think the bed icon clearly demonstrates what you use a hotel for - a place to sleep. This encompasses hotels that aren't several stories tall as well.

Our thoughts exactly -- it's not an icon that has any inherent meaning, which we thought made it too vague for usage without a text label.

We came to that conclusion too and originally had the silhouette of a bed rather than the exterior or a hotel building[1]. Our client[2], however, had different ideas.

And no, I have no idea why flight plus hotel equals desert island with palm trees...

[1] http://i.imgur.com/VJKiI.png

[2] http://www.onthebeach.co.uk

It means "package vacation" which for lots of people means "Caribbean island and it doesn't really matter which one."

The island photo is pretty synonymous with package holiday in the UK, which flight + hotel approximates in this case.

In the context of flight / hotel / car / etc., I think hotel-building is very clear. In fact, much clearer than a bed -- after all, having an airline seat represent a plane would be quite confusing, and having a bed represent a hotel is no clearer.

However, outside the context of other reservation-related icons, I agree that the "building" icon is lacking in specificity. The bed icon is slightly better, but still by no means good. It could just as easily mean sleeptime or rest, as opposed to daytime or work.

It's a shame there are no symbols or architecture inherently associated with hotels. Maybe that's why they tend to feel so anonymous and devoid of any soul...

> having an airline seat represent a plane would be quite confusing, and having a bed represent a hotel is no clearer

The distinction here is that you don't get in an airplane to sit in the seats, you get in an airplane so it can fly somewhere with you in it, and the shape of an airplane is very good at conveying that. With a hotel, I don't go there so I can admire the building, I go there so I have somewhere to sleep.

Bed is lodging, which is a concept that has been used in road signs around the world for ages. It's really a no-brainer to pick this one over a building.

Its very hard to show a hotel as an icon, particularly as a building. We did it by showing a building with signage of a bed (showing a similar design to the cleartrip icon). People are used to seeing a bed and making the association. So going with a simpler icon without the building also conveys the same meaning as a hotel.

this blog post shows the subtly and intricate details required in good design and UI.

Maybe worth noting that there isn't actually a "hotel" pictogram -- rather it's the "hotel information" pictogram with the information part cut out.

Anyone else think the stairs down and escalator down icons need to flipped horizontally (direction of travel left-to-right?). As it stand's there's little to distinguish up and down, and it doesn't "read" naturally.

Yes, I had exactly the same thought.

The corollary is that these icons are as bad as text; sure, they work great for left-to-right reading Americans that designed them, but what about everyone else? (My favorite is the "parking" icon. How does a big P help someone who calls a parking lot a "駐車場"? The P icon looks like, "welp, nobody that came to the meeting came up with a good idea, so let's just implement a shitty idea instead." "Sounds good, Bob! Man we're dumb!")

With all the backlash over Gmail's icons, why not just use text?

Because said backlash is a tempest in a teapot? Because the eye resolves (clear) icons more easily than text?

It's still a bed, which is still hard to see from afar.

We hope that it's a clearer bed than what we originally started with.

With respect to seeing it from afar -- the contexts in which we are using the icon is for desktop and post-PC device user interfaces. Interfaces which aren't usually used from afar. Most users who are exposed to this icon will be looking at it from just two to three feet away.

All the other icons you are using are clear, but that one does not look like a bed.

I think it doesn't matter if it's a bed or not, just that the icon is recognizable in small sizes. I think they did a good job in that sense.

It's also the letter H.

Seems more like a re-render than a re-design...

Just use text.

There's really something to this. The original symbols needed to be universally understood because they were intended to be used on signs, which are obviously a static medium. The web and apps can be tailored to the observer's language preference. Maybe a universal symbol isn't necessary here.

@nerd_in_rage -- we originally started with purely text as an approach. You can see one of our older blog posts here where we talk about the simplicity and clarity afforded by "Just use text": http://blog.cleartrip.com/2007/03/10/a-picture-says-a-thousa...

Over time, however, we changed our minds a little bit. And we were driven, in no small part, by the rapid shift to web consumption on post-PC devices. We explained our thinking in another blog post:

http://blog.cleartrip.com/2011/01/20/testing-an-all-new-navi...

The redesigned icon has the added benefit of subconsciously conjuring thoughts of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza

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