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Comment by finghin | Hacker News Reader

> Prefer words to icons. Use only icons that are universally understood.

Underrated. Except for dyslexic people, and the most obvious icon forms, I am pretty sure most people are just better and faster at recognising single words at a glance than icons.

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I'm somewhat dubious about that for icons with actual recognizable pictures, but a lot of icon attempts today are stylized to death, with just a line, bent and broken in a couple places and maybe if you're lucky juxtaposed with the occasional dot. If there's no text description even on mouseover (or touchscreen, with no cursor...) discovery is more or less trial and error (or perhaps more akin to Russian Roulette if the permissions involve being able to do real damage). Scratch your head and hope there are existing support questions searchable about what on Earth the programmer could have meant to convey...

There's tons of research on this. Use words.

It varies, some applications - the ones that people spend their workday in - have specific iconography that is domain specific for that application.

A difference needs to be made between general public applications and domain specific employee applications. SAP is a great example of this. Of domain specific icons I mean, not of good UX design.

...except for HN "unvote"/"undown" feedback which is especially unfortunate due to the shared prefix. Every time I upvote something I squint at the unvote/undown to make sure I didn't misclick.

I'm still shocked that the links are so dang close together on mobile. You don't even need the proverbial fat fingers.

I am pretty sure icons are easier and faster to recognize, except when you make them (too) small. In particular, they probably are easier in the long run, as long as they don't change position. But in a context where things change or you need a lot of buttons, words probably win.

This is why you need both. Icons are faster to recognize, but words tell you what the icons need. So you need the words at first to discover the icons, then the icons serve as valuable tools for scanning and quickly locating the click target that you are looking for.

That's what I tend to do too, but sometimes space requirements win.

But of course, a good design is adapted to its user: frequent/infrequent is an important dimension, as is the time willing to learn the UI. E.g., many (semi) pro audio and video tools have a huge number of options, and they're all hidden under colorful little thingies and short-cuts.

Space is important there, because you want as many tracks and Vu meters and whatever on your screen as possible. Their users are interested in getting the most out of them, so they learn it, and it pays off.

> This is why you need both. Icons are faster to recognize, but words tell you what the icons need. So you need the words at first to discover the icons, then the icons serve as valuable tools for scanning and quickly locating the click target that you are looking for.

Only if there are few icons. If every item in that menu in the screenshot of Windows had an icon, and all icons were monochrome only, you'd never quickly find the one you want.

The reason icons in menu items work is because they are distinctive and sparse.

This is not true. Just today for example, in android at least, I went to whatsapp, selected a chat with long tap, I want to archive the chat. I have a download like button. Apparently that is the archive button. I had no idea.

If it was the opening to the alternate dimension, I wouldn't still know. If it was something harmful like backup and delete, I wouldnt know. I just took the plunge and hoped it wasn't gonna be harmful. Luckily it was archive.

These kind of stupid things are there now in their calling screen and other places. Absolutely ridiculous and hard for me. Now imagine my parents who are 60+!!

Easier has more than one dimension (speed, error rate, recall, precision, cognitive load), but the baseline for generic statements is not one particular, very rare task. That's anecdote.

And in this case, the statement was about recognition, not intuition. Otherwise there are counter arguments: there are enough words in UIs which do not have an intuitive meaning either. "New" would be one. New what? File and folder are others, especially with decreasing awareness of the file system under young generations.

I'd say that you recognized the button fast enough, but the wrong function was attached to it. It's as if they would have had a menu item called "Download" which would archive.

> Now imagine my parents who are 60+!!

I can, because I am too.

You're wrong. There's a body of literature on this. I encourage you to review it.

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