Why consistency in icons is important and how to achieve it
blog.scoutzie.com
blog.scoutzie.com
Twenty years after they appeared with the Macintosh, it's becoming clearer they icons are not a particularly useful UI device.
I would assert that icons, like skeuomorphs, remain in the graph vocabulary not because of their utility or because they create beautiful designs but because the user a feeling of comfort and familiarity (which is sort-of a design concern but not always a necessary design concern). Further, I don't think this consideration is going to go away once enough electronic "things" replace their physical equivalents - a typewriter is still strong as a symbol even in a world where no one uses a typewriter. Because an electronic "thing" is never going to be "ready-at-hand", it will forever need a ready-at-hand physical object to give a comforting sense of realness.
Google are famously data-driven, but I really can't imagine how they're finding empirical support for the idea that abstract monochrome icons are more effective than clear text labels.
So if you click a message from the "Work" label, it removes the "Work" label. And if you click a message from Inbox and hit "y", it removes it from Inbox (i.e. archives it).
So it seems icons have to be internationalised too.
I depend on the labels when I've just installed a new app on my phone. After a while, when I've learned to visually associate the icon with the app, I depend on the icon to locate the app more quickly than scanning the labels. The app's position within the app drawer changes frequently, so eidetic memory doesn't serve me well there.
I'd say there should be a setting within every app that allows you to display or hide the label, but even as I consider that, I reject it, because it gives the app drawer an inconsistent look. And if I stop using an app for a while, I might forget what its icon looks like, and have to fall back on the labels again.
For example, an airplane taking off, that is an icon that clearly shows departures at the airport. Trash can, as we are all familiar with it now, is an obvious way to throw something away ...etc.
You can have labels, where possible, if you're using icons, chances are you are already tight on space.
For example: My android phone has a loupe icon in the corner of the screen. It's arguably an universally well known skeuomorph. And yet, what does it do? Zoom? Search? Search what? My apps? The web?
For all its flaws, Microsoft Metro has the merit of realizing that icons often don't really have the communicativeness that many designers imagine. Sometimes a word is worth a dozen very sketchy pictures too, or at least is more specific than any given picture.
And in the real world, icons, symbols, or colors help users immediately understand how to use something (while driving, I would stop at a red octagon even if it didn't explicitly say STOP).
So if you're right, nobody would ever need to learn how to read them or what their meaning is.
There is very little "iconic" about Chinese characters, with the exception of a select few ("Pictograms" is a gross mischaracterization). No attempt was made during their (thousand-year long) formulation (and certainly none during the reform), to design them so that their meaning was readily apparent from their form (Rather, most consist of a semantic classifier loosely classifying them based on meaning, and a "phonetic" component loosely hinting at their pronunciation). Thus, their lack of readily perceivable meaning has little bearing on the possibility of intentionally designed icons having readily perceivable meaning.
(Though not directly related to my point, I also must point out your assertion "each depicting a single, well-defined language element and having just one unambiguous, official reading" is false. One example (of thousands): 行, pronounced as any one of [xíng, háng, xìng, hàng, héng] and meaning any one of ["go", "travel/walk", "row", "action", "trade/profession", "seniority", "competent", "makeshift"])
But when you have multiple services that all cover the same basic thing, your icon needs to transcend its very basic function. Yelp, for example, needs to look different than Urbanspoon. Twitter needs to be distinct from Facebook. Flickr separate from Photobucket.
The notion that the icon should be immediately communicative of the app's purpose is a nice one that just doesn't scale. Sure, you see envelope you think email, you see telephone you see phone. What happens when you see a TV? Is that your HBO app? Your ABC app? Hulu?
Any app of sufficient complexity would be better represented via branding rather than a pictograph of its basic function.
I don't get why you're mixing the two matters.
FWIW, I still disagree with pictograms replacing labels. I'm a fan of the idea conceptually, but in every instance I've seen it done it simply hasn't been intuitive enough for me to consider it a working solution.
Maybe someday someone will get it right - but I'm not holding my breath. Purely pictographic iconography is like the cold fusion of UI design.
Take Win8 for example, which I've been using for the past two weeks - the UI is very deliberately minimalist, and drops almost all labels from icons. This has proven to be very frustrating.
Some buttons are very self-evident and work - the back button in Metro apps, the WiFi icon, etc, have fairly self-evident functions.
Others (and there are many) are just terribly confusing, especially for novice users. In the Email app the "send" icon is completely non-obvious, and it's confusing in a situation that disallows trial and error (you just spent 10 minutes typing an email, do you really want to play a game of "wonder what this does"?)
So there are a tiny subset of functions where there exists a universal enough, and popular enough icon that the functionality would be recognizable. Apps, however, go well beyond the dead obvious and implement complex functionality that cannot be easily summarized in a pictograph - especially in a cross-cultural and cross-language way.
I just don't see this working, though I'm personally interested in seeing this pan out.
It is a working solution. Pictograms are used in place of labels everyday, in large scale. Look no further than all traffic signs in the planet earth for an example.
For instance, the "back button" is obvious for you because you understand the metaphor. It isn't so clear for someone used to right-to-left scripts, like arabic.
On the other hand, the "send email" action on that particular software you mention has a confusing icon because there's no clear metaphor for what "sending an email" should look like - it's a relatively new idea and no one agreed on a symbol for it, therefore you don't know what to expect.
This is just lack of vision from whoever designed this interface, not a problem with pictograms. You only use pictograms when you can transmit an idea more concisely. If the most concise explanation you have is a label, then a label it should be.
However, I would like to see this combined with a discussion of how to achieve something better (despite the post's title, it is just a short discussion of some icon's problems sans any discussion of what to do about this). As a non-designer occasionally having to pick or create icons, I find extremely hard to find any symbol that effectively symbolizes the action/object I want it to. And drawing such a thing in limited space is obviously a problem too. How do you that and avoid problems of uneven abstraction level, uneven stroke level and so-forth. I've seen icon sets with very even stroke level but which had the even more deadly problem that you couldn't tell what a substantial portion of the icons were. That's much worse than uneven design in the end, I'd say.
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