Could we kill the icon?
joecritchley.svbtle.com
joecritchley.svbtle.com
FlatUI is making it impossible to distinguish between buttons, tags, labels and tabs. Skeuomorphism, correctly derided in its cartoonish, Mac Calendar form, has come to mean having any depth in a UI. Sane-looking buttons? Skeuomorphic! Using an inset for an aside? Skeuomorphic! Icons? Skeuomorphic! Mouse pointer? Skeuomorphic!
It reminds me of the way the the Bauhaus guys would yell "Bourgeois!" at one another's designs until all they were left with were unlivable, white cubes:
The idea of banishing icons is, however, kind of nutty. Icons serve both a practical and aesthetic role, and switching to fluid layers of words is going to both be aesthetically limiting and confusing.
If you go further, you could say that the glyphs of the letters themselves are skeuomorphs, in the same way that icons are.
When it comes down to it, buttons are a simple and effective interface, regardless of whether or not they represent some physical or historical analog.
If you're going to say buttons and tabs are skeuomorphic, what isn't skeuomorphic? Interacting with a CLI resembles the back-and-forth query and response of conversational dialogue: it's skeuomorphic too!
Here's a question for you: what, exactly, is wrong with using metaphors for existing, well-known analogues to convey information in a new context? Isn't this how languages, notational conventions, and symbolic connotations naturally evolve among humans? I understand why people are tired of Apple's excess, but what's the problem with skeuomorphism per se?
There is no need to cleanse the world of symbols away because the metaphor no longer holds.
And no, young people have absolutely no problem figuring out what the symbols are for - they just don't know why. Oh well.
Not to mention that it's nice to have UIs that carry over from one device to another, so that you don't have to switch to a whole new set of symbols when you go from your laptop to your phone.
Animated icons it is. There is also a mention of these symbols in Anathem. I haven't got an impression that author sees them as a higher form of communication, rather they are a more "secular" form.
Btw, I have under 200 program icons in the launcher of my phone, they are arranged (or better word disarranged) in a grid by alphabet or installation time, some are in folders. I know the position of frequently used ones but for rare used ones nothing is better then good old search by letters.
You might as well get rid of the letters on keyboards because umpteen thousand years ago they were pictographs for objects or concepts which are no longer relevant to modern young people.
Important to distinguish two types of users here:
(a) Someone unfamiliar with a UI will need more visual cues, textual hints, and so on. "What does this button/icon do?" Without helpful text, they may be stuck.
(b) But, someone who has used a particular piece of UI hundreds of times will simply zero in on an app by its icon's shape/color/position. In this case, it's much better to have many varying icons rather than pretty but similar-looking circles. And in this case, it doesn't actually matter what the icons portray.
The iOS 7 Safari icon, while unsightly, catches my eye every darn time. Is that its purpose? And, again, in iOS 7, is this why the gradients follow opposite directions?
Would love if anyone could point to more "science" in this, as I'm simply speaking from my observations.
If I need to open Gmail, I'm not just looking for the word "Gmail" in a list, I'm using a much more complex search algorithm.
I'm looking for:
- the distinctive red/gray lines
- a rectangle
- the word "gmail"
- words that start with f, or start with h
- a specific region of my screen, that I remember last housing this icon
Firstly, symbols have been around for thousands of years. Our written language is built around them, and our everyday life is surrounded by them. These aren't going anywhere and are a required abstraction for higher thought. These aren't going away.
Second, logos are prettier symbols, but they are pervasive in our world. Every single business has a logo and tries to push that logo and brand at you every chance they get. These aren't going away.
Third, icons are logos and/or symbols. It stands to reason that if the previous two aren't going anywhere, then icons aren't going anywhere.
Until we have telepathy, that is.
This misses the point in favor of some misguided idealism, I think. It's hard enough to cram a functional, usable interface into the space provided often enough without worrying about throwing a hard-won language of visual metaphors straight into the trash before you start.
"skeuomorph!"
Obviously it doesn't matter to you what the icons are - you'll learn them and use them.
Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often, or who hasn't used this particular piece of software before. What works for those people?
I'll agree that the article doesn't make any sense for those people either.
Actually, let's not. There's no justification for hobbling utility of computers for those who do use them in order to make them putatively more understandable to those who do not.
Of course, your point still stands: the established conventions - common icons, CLIs, WIMP interfaces, etc. - are the language that's evolved among those who do use computers, and attempting to replace it with something cut from whole cloth makes computing less accessible to everyone.
"That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is."
I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural.
Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past".
"Imagine a native digital medium"
In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract.
And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before-seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.
Some people are image oriented, and can go by the icons. Some people are text oriented and can just read the text.
The text helps first timers who might not yet be aware of certain icon conventions. The icons help power users because icons with clear silhouettes can be read very fast.
And yet another group of people read the text and look at the icon every time - even during repeated use. Because there are several parts of the brain that recognize a command, they feel more assured that what they are about to click is the right thing, and therefore feel more comfortable with the GUI.
All of this is nothing new, really. It goes back to the very first GUIs. There is 30 years of experience with this, there are probably lots of studies that this is indeed a good way to go.
So no, we should not kill the icon.
It doesn't "feel" like that to me, as far as my own metaperception goes. At least not at a purely semantic level: I see a word, and I associate it with a concept; I see an icon, and I associate it with a concept. There's rarely any syntactic relationship among icons as there is among words, so icons are equivalent to merely seeing an single word in isolation, labelling something.
CLIs (and textual environments generally) also use icons that have long been divorced from the real-world things they originally represented. And in ways which have nothing to do with their original iconic uses, anyhow.
I'm not sure how that's better than just using icons.
And many don't, thus it's still useful.
Ultimately because people prefer the control that it gives them. They can edit a document and just decide they don't want to save their changes and they can do that. Or they can save it under a different name or in a different folder.
While a lot of metaphors to old ways of doing things (office work, etc.) may be clumsy, the "native" interface to the computer is really far too low-level for everyday use.
He talks about having users provide their own gestural icons... which just seems like it would be a pain to have to come up with a new kind of flourish every time you installed an app, and I supposed speech recognition, which like gestural commands has a place but I don't think necessarily surpasses the utility of "the little orange and blue round thingy makes firefox happen". I mean that's just perfect.