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Comment by asperous | Hacker News Reader

What I've always found fascinating was that how much easier I've always found words to find and use than images.

You'd think little pictograms would be quicker but whenever an interface focuses on using lots of little icons I find it a mental workout to find which one I'm looking for.

For example, many people dislike the new gmail layout, but the biggest ux stumble I have is clicking the attach pictogram instead of the the link one. I thought it was interesting that in the results in the article 21% of people reported the reverse, they associated attach with the link pictogram.

In RL companies use pictograms because you don't have to localize, but the internet is dynamic and the tooltips are already localized, why not just use words?

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> why not just use words

You may run out of room in the interface if the word is substantially longer in some language.

This is a particular problem if the original work is in a language like Japanese, which has short words compared to, say, English. (Japanese Kanji [1] has thousands of characters available, compared to the measly twenty-six of the English alphabet, so it's not surprising that Japanese words are shorter on average.)

Many HN readers are probably familiar with the example of video games that are English localizations of Japanese originals. Sometimes the UI or art simply doesn't have room to accomodate the longer English equivalents. (Particularly in earlier decades when localization wasn't as high a priority as it is today.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Total_number_of_kanji

Your mention of Kanji is particularly salient, as the blog post catches these skeuomorphic icons in the act of evolving from pictograms to ideograms...

Good point. In 100 years maybe physical floppy disks will be long-forgotten by everyone but museums and historians, but the icon will still be in everyday use.

And maybe the icon will change over time. As the public's consciousness of physical floppies dies away, maybe designers will feel freer to use a more stylized representation, like the Voicemail icon's representation of a...telephone handset? Cassette tape?

It's the tape inside a cassette. Like the old answering machines.

Sometimes, you don't have space, you don't want to promote use of the function or maybe it's clear enough without words.

An example of the latter one: an [x] in the top right hand corner.

Or the magnifying glass inside an input box.

I wonder if those icons are simply reinforcing your premade assumption of what clicking in that area does. I honestly do not know the answer to this question: without ever seeing it performed for them, would someone know how to close a window the first time?

Well, amongst other icons, you'd want some indication of which one to click.

And even if it's reinforcing what you assume; isn't that a good thing? It means you recognized the icon. That's the point, isn't it?

Yes, it gives you more confidence in what you were already doing. I'm talking about situations where you don't know already what you're doing. Where you are looking for the right icon, rather than being greeted by it.

I think that the usability of words/pictograms/etc. depends a lot on the user. I find pictograms generally easier to distinguish at a glance, but only if the color content is different, or if the shape is strikingly different. I tend to have a problem with the way a lot of icons for programs come in a couple different shades of blue. Words only work effectively for me if the words are different lengths or at least if the first letter is different -- I tend to only notice the first letter and the shape.

Note that Gmail includes a setting to switch the icons back to text labels (Settings --> General --> Button Labels).

No dice on the gmail android application unfortunately, where the icons are indecipherable.

Anyway, I am confused as to why the librarians would think college students have never seen floppies, particularly "a few years ago". Flash drives really only started to cut into floppy use in around 2003-2004 from my perspective. Before that everyone of course used CD's for big stuff, but floppies if they wanted to shuffle documents around. I remember submitting assignments to teachers on floppy drives as late as 2004.

This seems to be the modern equivalent of: "I bet you've never seen one of these before!" * points to a vinyl record *.

but very few people who are in college right now were perhaps old enough to remember floppy disks. I graduated from college in 2012 and remember having floppy disks as a kid (I think for Encarta?) but don't remember ever using them.

I think that we're right on the cusp of people graduating college who have never used a floppy disk.

I figure a college freshman's knowledge of tech should surely go at least twelve years back in all but the rare case. I haven't seen continuous stationary printers, 8-tracks, or even 5.25" floppies since I was in elementary school, but those things would not baffle me today, let alone 12 years from when I saw them.

12 years ago flash drives were barely 1 year old, were quite expensive, and barely stored more than a floppy anyway. Network storage in organizations like schools was abysmal (actually, this hasn't really changed from what I have seen...), services like dropbox were non-existent for regular consumers, and who the hell ever used zip drives? Floppies were everywhere.

If you told me that people graduating highschool right now did not know why floppies were called "floppies", then I would not be terribly surprised, but I think we've still got a few years left until they don't know what they are.

I don't know, maybe my school district had some sort of technology lagging bubble around it. That actually seems plausible.

I also remember using floppy disks in around 2004, so it's not just you.

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