I remember when I was playing around with building an HTPC for my car in the mid-2000s and I got to trying to put a frontend skin on the touchscreen. And I found all the existing skins completely awful because they were wall to wall arbitrary icons, in a setting where I needed at a glance functionality.

Eventually made my own, and the key element? No icons at all. Just text - potentially small text - on the buttons. Turns out, being something you spend your entire life reading, text works great - within a sparse set, you can resolve exactly what a word is from letter shapes even if you can't directly read it, and if you don't know what something is you can just read it.

No one ever had any problem using it, even if they'd never seen it before, because every button said exactly what it did.