Comment by prof_hobart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prof_hobart | Hacker News Reader

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From that article.

"How would user interfaces look if we had no preconception of their analogies? No magnifying glasses for search; no cogs for settings. And then, with that tweet, I realised I had unintentionally focused on icons. It’s icons that are still the problem."

He seems to be making a leap I don't follow there. Why is the use of magnifying glasses/cogs a problem? Who are they a problem for? My 70 year old mother knows what they mean at a glance, as does my 7 year old daughter, and I doubt that many people in between struggle with their meaning.

Pictures often have more impact, and more visual appeal, than words. If I have to do a presentation and I create one that's nothing but words, my audience will typically be far less engaged than if I'd replaced most of the words with other visual clues.

And the same applies to icons. A big green tick is more immediate than a button with "OK" on it. I can spot a cog much more quickly in a screen than the word "settings" buried in a screen full of other words.

So what problem is "no icons" trying to solve?

Does your 7 year old daughter know what a floppy disk icon does? I bet she does. Does she know what the floppy disk is though? Mine doesn't (12y/o). She just knows that she needs to click it if she wants to save a file in an editor. Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save".

That's exactly why icons are useful.

You speak and read english because you're brought up with it around you. You don't need to know the latin roots for a word to understand it's meaning. The root meaning of an icon is not important, just the fact that it's a 'random squiggle' that is universally recognised regardless of context is it's strength.

You can remove all icons and just replace them with words such as 'save', but now you must translate them for all languages, and scanning for the word is slower.

However, interfaces packed with random icons which have no recognisable meaning - that is a terrible anti-pattern.

Yes, I agree, icons are much faster to recognise than words. But I think we're limited to only a handful of icons that are universally (??) recognisable. And now more often than not I find hovering mouse pointer over an icon just to find out what it does. How easy is to guess what these 3 icons do if you never used the tool before http://imgur.com/TclsCh2 ?

> But I think we're limited to only a handful of icons that are universally (??) recognisable.

Wouldn't you argue that the floppy disk is a universally recognizable icon for saving? It's hardly misconstrued for something else, and with the exception of youth, it does make sense (without using it before) to a majority of the population.

> Does your 7 year old daughter know what a floppy disk icon does?

Yes.

>Does she know what the floppy disk is though?

Possibly (she's into retro-gaming, and occasionally uses my Amiga). But it's not actually important because the icon means save. Anacronisms like that are a part of the way that language (both verbally and non-verbally) develop. I doubt that many people have ever written on a scroll. But using the word in the context of "scroll bar" isn't confusing as a result.

>Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save".

Except for the fact that we already have an image that means save that everyone understands. We could equally make up a brand new word for "scroll bar" to remove its anacronistic link, but what would be the point?

"Drawing a random squiggle" and assigning it a meaning is exactly how symbols work. Stopping your car at intersections has exactly nothing to do with red octagons inherently, its just a symbol that we've assigned a meaning to.

"Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save""

At this point there's really no reason to replace the floppy with a squiggle or anything else. It is a virtually universally understood defacto standard at this point, so unless there is a super compelling reason to stop (and I can't think of any) we should just keep using it regardless of whether anyone actually uses floppies anymore or not.

That aside, "random squiggles" make terrible icons. There has to be some notable structure to an image for it to have meaning when it is placed alongside other images.

Eg. if you had a "random squiggle" for save and a "random squiggle" for load, even if the squiggles were pretty different and were used consistently, most people would have a very difficult time remembering which is which if they were actually just random squiggles, and not something with a more clear & defined structure.

Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept. The metaphors of icons don't work.

A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other...

"Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs" - and we too use ideograms every day. %, &, +, $ etc. What else are they? "we've lost the link to the original concept" - which concept? And why (I mean, what indicates that this actually happened)? "The metaphors of icons don't work" - again, since when? Why? What substantiates this claim? "A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other..." - I agree and I'm sure there are countless examples of poorly designed icons, but it doesn't invalidate the very concept of ideograms. Just like the existence of milions of incomprehensible error messages doesn't really undermine the value of an error message in itself :) It's just poor execution of an otherwise valuable method of communication

> Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Icons are not hieroglyphs, in fact the idea behind icons is the opposite. Icons trancend language and present a concept across language barriers. If you need to go to the bathroom in russia you will know which door to take thanks to an icon.

> Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept.

Hm? Egyptian hieroglyphs are not metaphorical ideograms but part of a "true" phonetic writing system. Nothing has been lost.

If I remember what I learned in Egyptology class, this is actually not entirely true. Although pure phonetic writing was possible, in actual practice hieroglyphs were a mixed system wherein individual hieroglyphs were sometimes treated as pictograms in order to give additional contextual meaning to a phonetically spelled word.

> Who are they a problem for?

They're a problem for users who haven't used that interface before. Imagine a novice user grappling with binoculars and magnifying glasses.

Who doesn't associate glasses/binoculars with "find", "hunt", "look", "search". Even if I use a piece of software I've never seen before, I generally know what the icons mean, and usually buttons will have a title — or below the icon on OSX sometimes — on hover to give more information.

You missed the other use, which is "zoom".

So, when you're looking for zoom do you want the binoculars or the magnifying glass? Or do you want something else, which you don't know yet?

Zoom is a magnifying glass containing a `+` or `-` (or both, if it's a zoom menu?).

Search is an empty magnifying glass next to/within a text field.

Thats a weak argument. The designers job is to choose sufficiently recognizable icons if they actually want them to be recognized. One magnifying glass looks like most others, and the same goes for most symbols in current widespread use.

Bad designers are the problem, icons are fine. Icons are more efficient. Reading the full word takes longer and recognizing an icon is something the primate brain has developed to excel at over millions of years, in the form of things like predators, prey and brightly colored, specifically patterned fruits shrouded in dense forests.

Pattern recognition runs deep. Icons aren't a problem any more than calling a search function "find" or "browse" or "look for".

>> DanBC: They're a problem for users who haven't used that interface before.

> babby: The designers job is to choose sufficiently recognizable icons if they actually want them to be recognized.

You're both right. It depends whether you're focusing on the people using computers today or the (larger, but more distant) people learning to use computers tomorrow.

I don't need to imagine one. I have one. She's 7 now. She learned the meaning of those icons in the same way that she learned other words and symbols.

Knowing that you click on binoculars or a magnifying glass to look for things is absolutely no different to knowing to use the "search" or "find" option in a menu.

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