I do speak pictogram, but only the ones with previously established meanings. Bathroom sign? No problem. Box with a down arrow, no. But I do know Apple's "bankers box" icon for archive. Having seen actual boxes like that for archiving old papers, combined with having used Mail for years, it makes sense to me.

That first part though, where I know what a bankers box is used for, really helps make the icon connect. I think this is important, but at the same time, it's difficult because it's not universal. The "floppy disk" save icon has already turned into an arbitrary symbol for younger generations, and I expect the bankers box is well on its way (if not there already). Maybe FBI evidence rooms in TV shows will help it hold out.

Floppy disk has an advantage because at least it's consistent across a ton of software. If you make up an icon and use it in one interface and then redesign that interface again in 4 years, you have a much harder time getting people to attach meaning to it consistently.

It's the visual equivalent of a text button with "Mloroab" on it. Yeah I speak English, but I don't know what that does.

Except they haven't used it in one product and a redesign. That is the standard archive icon on Android where it is used by a multitude of apps and millions of people daily.

Ah I haven't been on Android for a couple of years so I wasn't familiar with it. Having said that, I still think Apple's version is a clearer design.

I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost

Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left!

One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool.

On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place.

Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors.

I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away.

[1] http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-inte...

I also was a big fan of Windows Phone. It was a good OS and the live-tile interface was brilliant. Also agree the introduction of the hamburger menu was confusing and pointless in replacing something that worked.

I don't think MS had any confidence in anything they were doing over that time because they never seemed to properly commit to anything. Win Phone could have been bigger and competitive if they'd focused effort on it (marketing - and no not MS's standard marketing 'quality,' app dev funding, etc)

Seriously. They should be launched like a gaming portable with the phone OS. An xbox branded Nokia answer to the Xperia play.

I loved how WP took the "keys" to design away from the apps. They created a very simple, restrictive design language and locked apps into it. You want color? It's a button. You want to put color on a non-button? Piss off. Colored rectangle = button.

So much flat design fails the "which things are a button" test, WP did it right.

That said, the OS had some flaws on a design level at the start:

Wasted column on the home screen just for the swipe arrow. No notification tray - only live tiles.

Over-restrictive icons made it often hard to tell icons apart. Yes, I get your great design, but pure monochrome silhouettes is a bit too restrictive for app-specific icons.

I loved the idea that a person has a home-screen - that's something that every OS should steal. If I open up a person, I should see every social share they've made, every interaction I've had with them, and every interaction I can start with them. Then I don't care how many messaging apps Google launches, because I don't need to have any messaging apps on my home screen, only my Contacts.

> WP was doing flat design before it was cool.

it was somewhat annoying to watch the community go religious on flat design when "Apple invented it"

Hey, I thought Google invented flat! /s

Seriously though, Windows phones sucked for many reasons (including lack of exposed features in the OS, especially in first versions, and of course lack of apps in general), but UX wasn't one of them. I guess they failed in releasing too much of an MVP, and then not following through properly. I continue to claim that Microsoft had a great UX vision for mobile, and that they're the only one with an OS that can turn tablets from consumption devices into productive tools.

Hah, it's funny - when iOS 8 came out I noticed that a lot of the screenshots were nearly indistinguishable from WP with the background switched to white.

> Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left!

On early iPhones this was within the reach of the thumb. On later iPhones they introduced the swipe to solve the issue posed by larger screens.

I had an early Windows phone and loved it. It had crazy good battery life. It made common action super efficient. It got out of my way. It organized all my social media so, so well. Its autocomplete when typing was better than anything I've used to date (though, I hear it actually worsened over time). I miss that phone.

Seconding the keyboard: perfect spacing, pleasing fonts, fast animations and responsive feeling and hands down the best text prediction I’ve ever used: best suggestions, best balance between aggression and accuracy. You could write a word and have it return any matching emoji’s literally years before Android or iOS.

Cut copy paste was best on win phone.

I was interested to see what that looked like and found

Opening down: http://www.mobiletechworld.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/...

Opening up: http://i.stack.imgur.com/gZdjo.png

I like it

The one I'm talking a about is the first link. That's how it was in WP7 and 8.

First is WP 8, second is Windows 10. They have nothing to do with each other.

BitBucket also hides labels by default: https://i.imgur.com/2OQxliT.png

One sorry soul at my work hadn't realised you can expand the sidebar to reveal the labels. Watching him trying to find everything was quite amusing

Atlassian is the king of indecipherable symbols. My JIRA navigation strategies are:

- Hover over each symbol one-by-one until tooltip shows itself (sometimes takes multiple tries); or

- Google "how to find X in JIRA"

I manage to come away feeling like an idiot every time I open JIRA. I just typed out a typical internal monologue while using it, and deleted it because I'm embarrassed by it.

My brain cannot tell the difference between the Jira and confluence favicons. I am forever clicking on the wrong browser tab.

Remember when they redesigned them to look more like each other? That was great.

It was really tremendous. Truly a Day among days.

I think the symbol that looks like a nut with the threaded hole off centre is the "Google how to find X in JIRA" icon.

(No, not the "Tests" icon, its got the hole slightly off centre to the left. Or the "Calendar" icon, its fo the hole slightly off centre to the upper left.)

Exactly. Human language invented by speakers actually communicating over critical issues (trade, war, sex) over thousands of years.

Don't trust a single set of new glyphs, cobbled together by designers, basically unilaterally compared to a huge marketplace of speakers, whose purpose is not necessarily to communicate, but sometimes, "to look good" or "match aesthetic" of the context.

Something developed without the same selective pressure cannot be trusted the same to be as effective.

It really is frustrating using new software for work that has only icons with ~3 second hover delay of showing the action label.

Worse on mobile where you can't hover.

On Android you can long press the button and you get a tooltip. It works as long as the app isn't using custom UI elements.

Androids physical menu button let you get to all the options regardless of the app you were using. I really miss that.

You can implement something like this on web using Office UI Fabric[1].

[1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/components/com...

But "..." is English (and multiple other languages), not an icon.