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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

How are they strictly superior? Here are at least two reasons where icons are better: Speed of recognition and needed Space (especially width).

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But that's just not true. If I have to sit there trying to figure out what an icon means, that's not faster than just reading the word.

Not when you first open the program, but for advanced users, absolutely.

How and why would I become an advanced user of a program I can't figure out how to use because none of the buttons have labels?

Pixelmator Pro shows you the names of the tool buttons, once, when you first launch the app. They disappear the moment you click a button. Nice. a whole 10 seconds to memorize all two dozen of them.

And they chose not to use the system tooltip on hover, so I have to wait for some humungous pictorial tooltip to load in when all I want to know is the goddamn hotkey.

How does that matter for the point? You can make it a setting for the user or just always show both. I never said that programs should exclusively use icons.

The initial claim was that text is strictly superior to icons, which means that icons have not a single thing they’re better at then text. That’s just plainly false.

That’s rarely the case, in my experience, especially when there are a dozen monochrome icons in a row. They just aren’t distinct or memorable enough. You learn their position after a while, but confirming the correct item by their pictogram remains slower than just reading a word or two, because the words are universal, whereas the pictograms are typically specific to the application.

Keyboard shortcuts are a feature for advanced users, not pictures.

For some definitions of "advanced".

I use dozens of apps regularly enough to not be a beginner but not so much that I know their keyboard shortcuts. Icons have a role.

Good luck learning keyboard shortcuts for every feature of a CAD tool. I understand Boolean modifiers from symbols faster than I can read them, but I’m not going to memorize every shortcut for stuff like that.

There's 3 boolean modifiers and they're used all the time, just learn the shortcuts.

It was a simple example. Have you ever used CAD software? There are literally thousands of features, you have 0 chance of learning every shortcut

I think the commenter you're replying to might have been referring to pictograms like many Chinese characters, not icons that you have to figure out. Or maybe not

> pictograms like many Chinese characters

A handful of Chinese characters are pictograms. As far as I recall, it is by far the smallest class of characters, and all of them, including the ones that started as pictograms, are treated by modern readers as phonetic indicators.

Compare e.g. 象 to https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/33_E87E.svg .

They are the same character. Does that help you if you're looking at 象?

I glance at a word and instantly (other than eye-to-brain processing delay) know what the word is. Icons that aren't the absolute most common take longer for me to parse.

As long as some people are different that you, it’s still not strictly superior though. If some people are better with icons, you still have to do a tradeoff.

It's almost like options are good. Let people have the option of icon-dominant or text-dominant UIs.

But we all know many modern designers don't know the value of giving the user choice (or aren't given the agency to do so by their employers).

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