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Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

The thing I hate most about modern UIs is the lack of information. Instead of buttons with text, it's just a whole bunch of mysterious icons. Give me at least some idea of what will happen when I click your icon, and please try and make it look clickable, rather than some background glyphs. Oh, and mobile OSes need to come up with some sort of analog for keyboard shortcuts.

Consistency is nice, but usability and discoverability are more important.

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Google seems to be worst with this. In addition to having confusing icons, they're not even consistent with themselves. The Gmail archive icon on my Android phone is a picture of a filing cabinet. The archive icon on their main web app is a box with an arrow pointing down. They're two completely different icons for the exact same action.

They balance that by elsewhere using the same icon for completely different actions, like the sealed envelope that means Compose as well as Mark Unread.

Agree! And it's getting even worse with all smartphones.

1. Icons are used far more often on smartphones to save space.

2. You don't have any mouse cursor to hover with and get a tooltip, you are left with the option to gamble and click or never try the button.

The gmail android app is horrible in this sense, "send" is just some weird arrow in the top right corner, i first thought it would open some menu. Fortunately it showed a confirmation dialog first...The rest of the icons aren't much better.

Windows Phone has a workable solution for this. Icons are shown for menus, but if you don't know what the icon means you can tap the ... at the edge of the menu bar and it pops up with some text underneath.

The ICS browser is the worst offender of this. If you enable Labs mode, the address bar disappears away and you need to gesture-swipe from the screen edge to get a semi-circular menu. Now, this in itself is a brilliant idea, only marred by the fact that it's a bunch of icons that you can't understand. I'd love if they added a big semi-transparent textbox on the top informing you which option is currently under your finger, something analogous to the alphabets that popup when you're scrubbing through the contact alphabet list.

I guess you'll like that Windows 8's Metro has labels underneath its icons, then.

it just doesn't make sense for mobile to have keyboard-shortcuts, the analog would be you touch the button, rather than bringing up a keyboard and typing shift-zz

I'd like something physical I can feel and use muscle memory to remember. Having to search the screen, interpret some obscure glyph and make sure I touch the right spot requires far too much attention for most tasks.

Volume down + left swipe to save a file. Camera button + screen tap to go to the app's home screen. Something like that, so I don't have to look. I'm not entirely familiar with screen gestures, but I guess that's the closest analog, so long as they aren't too complicated or picky.

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