Re:More fuckin' user interface design
by riho on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @01:51PM
(#26402238)
As a designer, an actual likely answer:
These are standard material design icons. Most likely someone needed to add a new button/feature and just picked whatever icon best fit the purpose, or someone designed a new icon that would fit the purpose of whatever feature/button was being added.
With huge apps like Gmail, there's likely just so many different things happening that there's no time allocated to check every small change in a broader context, and these kinds of things slip in and pile up.
Over time, more and more "small" things pile up, and eventually a redesign is necessary because the palette has been polluted with too many things and the software becomes too clunky.
Another option is that no designer even gave this a look, or they saw it too late. This happens often too, designers might be busy working on a big new design and an engineer needs to just put in a button and doesn't think twice about just using one of the icons from the icon library.
Incompetence can explain stuff sometimes, but just like engineering, design is also often a collection of compromises and sometimes a lot of compromises can collude together to form a bigger disaster. The call icon is a good example of this. It's constrained by a lot of things, like overall language rules of material design, and any prior interface design choices made about button styles, toggles, etc. If the designer came up with a totally new style of button, they'd also be scolded by their peers for not maintaining consistency.
All of that said, I'm not making excuses, I'm providing an explanation. I think overall, with any kind of iconography based interactions, when in doubt, add a label. It just works. Icons are abstractions of language and actions, when it's no longer clear what they are abstracting, it's time to use language. It really is that simple.
These are standard material design icons. Most likely someone needed to add a new button/feature and just picked whatever icon best fit the purpose, or someone designed a new icon that would fit the purpose of whatever feature/button was being added.
With huge apps like Gmail, there's likely just so many different things happening that there's no time allocated to check every small change in a broader context, and these kinds of things slip in and pile up.
Over time, more and more "small" things pile up, and eventually a redesign is necessary because the palette has been polluted with too many things and the software becomes too clunky.
Another option is that no designer even gave this a look, or they saw it too late. This happens often too, designers might be busy working on a big new design and an engineer needs to just put in a button and doesn't think twice about just using one of the icons from the icon library.
Incompetence can explain stuff sometimes, but just like engineering, design is also often a collection of compromises and sometimes a lot of compromises can collude together to form a bigger disaster. The call icon is a good example of this. It's constrained by a lot of things, like overall language rules of material design, and any prior interface design choices made about button styles, toggles, etc. If the designer came up with a totally new style of button, they'd also be scolded by their peers for not maintaining consistency.
All of that said, I'm not making excuses, I'm providing an explanation. I think overall, with any kind of iconography based interactions, when in doubt, add a label. It just works. Icons are abstractions of language and actions, when it's no longer clear what they are abstracting, it's time to use language. It really is that simple.