Laundry is literally filled with things to know, outside of these symbols. Household tasks are.

I don't see labels on bleech bottles, saying not to mix it with vinegar or you could die. Yet people have done that in the wash, so why not start there?

Here's what each sane person should do, who actually takes time to look at tags. (after all if you couldn't care less, and never look at tags, what's the point?)

Print a copy of the extended tag list out, and hang it in the laundry room at home. I have a cabinet where I keep extra detergent, etc, so I taped it up on the inside of the door.

Problem sovled.

For a laundrymat, for your smartphone, download a properly formatted, for easy phone viewing version.

Done.

Non-problem, compared to expecting the entire planet to change. We don't need another standard!!

All that would happen is I'd have two standards to look at.

- The Inmate Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper

- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

(and I'm sure there are many more good resources that are recent than that.)

It's very easy as tech-savvy people like us to underestimate how hard technology, even conventions like laundry symbols, are. I personally have printed out a legend explaining the laundry symbols and put them near to my washing machine, but I'm the only person I know who does that. Everyone else guesses or struggles to use laundry symbols correctly, or reads the text in English if it is provided.

Now, does that mean we should change all the laundry symbols just because one person shared a redesign on their blog? No. Changing something that is so well-established has significant downsides and risks. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to spot their difficulties, and to pursue better UX relentlessly, with testing with real users. That's what separates a good (UX) designer from an engineer who produces something that fits their mindset but not the mindset of actual users.

I myself recognize that I've seen a few of them, but since they are as cryptic as Egyptian hieroglyphs to me, I ignore them.

I only know the one for temperature, the "no dryer" one, "wash by hand" and "no spin-dry". But like you, I don't give a shit. I wash everything at 60 (underwear, bed sheets, towels) or 40 (everything else) °C with spin-dry at 1400rpm.[*] Some pieces might wear faster, but so be it. I guess the vast majority of people does it that way.

[*] Ok ok, except wool or cashmere, or a suit. But this is something I just learned from my mom at young age, not by researching any symbols.

Color-safe detergents have been the norm since my very early adulthood. I remember ads for it when I was a kid but by the time I was buying detergent, most detergent was color safe. I've never even bothered to sort by color, aside from keeping raw denim away from everything else (on the rare occasions it's washed at all).

What am I missing out on? My family's clothes seem to last just fine. My wife pays even less attention to this stuff than I do, and everything seems OK.

- Dry clean formal clothes

- Air dry wool

- If I'm going through a raw denim phase, keep it out of the regular laundry

- Everything else goes in the washer set on permanent press and then in the dryer at medium heat

Never in 17 years of doing my own laundry has this system failed me in any way.

And yes, I do pay attention (to the special cases). T-shirt? It's a t-shirt.

Winter coat? Fancy suit? See what it says. Or send it to be professionally cleaned.

Where it usually fails (with everyday stuff) is that people DNGAF and dry their clothes at 90C then come to heavily shrunk garments. Or with faded colors.

https://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/household-hi...

Wash on cold and hang dry is best if possible.

I tend to agree. As a culture we have the knowledge of the world in our pocket day in and day out yet we have become lazy and even obstinate about using it.

I've started turning gardening and landscaping into a bit of a hobby with my new house. I'm constantly looking up specifics on plants, how to prune, and etc. It is so much easier than when I last had a house. The workflow no longer requires amassed knowledge, books, or keeping every tag that came with every plant.

It's now:

Take a photo of plant Use app to identify Get all the info you need

What do you think the problem (one of them) with the Information Age is? The affordance of lookup makes it so that we have to look up more and more. And then we have to arrange more and more information in order to make the frequently-needed information convenient enough to look up.

Part of my generation and most of the previous generations IMO have never fully embraced a connected world. Just watching how much quarantine crushed some people and how some of us doubled down on online lives that were already fulfilling (discord, watch parties and online interaction). I've always felt judged by my older friends / folks my age about how I live my life. (I met my wife in an MMO a decade ago and we moved across the country to be together.)

When forced to go online, the generation that rejected online have an allergic reaction. I can't even count the number of times I have been texted or called for something personally or professionally that could be found in a 5 minute search by people who reject the idea of even searching first.

Long story short, I think it will literally die out.

I remember this in spite of not having done laundry in 5 years. And you're exactly right. New symbols mean little to me, I would still need to look them up and then there would be twice as many bad symbols.

This redesign article is an example of why you should avoid UI/UX people who can only design. They'll change your branding everytime they get bored and create more headache than they solve.

Just to highlight how non-universal these symbol are, I have never had an iron that has three levels of heat or that represents the levels with dots.

Funny thing, those two do not match. For example, on my current iron "Cotton" is marked at three-dots, whereas all my cotton clothes have labels that insist on ironing them on two-dots.

That's the square with no circle, the circle with no square is very different.

edit: Just to be clear, though, I agree with you - people should educate themselves and the fact that people won't make a point of educating themselves is the problem. I've had multiple experiences where I paused to look up if it was safe to mix medications that were being given to my kids, or if it was safe to use a human first aid ointment on a pet. Sometimes the answer is 'No!' but the general reaction is usually "Oh I wouldn't worry about it".

Have you looked? Mine says “STRONG OXIDIZING AGENT: Mix only with water. Mixing this product with chemicals […] may release hazardous gases”

You sure about that?

Or were you saying that the bleach bottles on your shelf state that one should not mix bleach with acids such as vinegar? I’d actually have to go look at mine, but I don’t recall a mention.

So I looked: the warning is in the middle of a wall of text, with print so small only pedantic geeks with good, young eyes are going to bother. Let alone be able to read it, anyone over 40 will need a magnifier.

It probably doesn't specify vinegar, but a general "do not mix with other cleaners". If it only said vinegar, then someone would mix it with ammonia and when they died, they'd claim "it only said vinegar!"

Without going back and straining my eyes, I don't think it even goes that far. Just do not mix with acids, and it specifically called out "urine and feces", from which I guess we're supposed to surmise that it is not a toilet cleaner? It's a difficult problem, yes, because "but it didn't say not to..."

But again, I'm pretty sure the solution does not lie in a wall of 6 pt. text., regardless of what it needs to say.

Maybe you gotta look them up on your own, but after a while, you learn the ones you need to.

30% to 50% regardless of who was what type in the past set. It's like if you changed the floppy disk icon in MS Word to a text box that read "SAVE".

The problem is ultimately that the symbols are so abstract that nobody remembers them.

(Chlorine) bleach mixed with ammonia (which is a base) or any acid, including vinegar, will release the chemical weapon chlorine gas.

Also, I missed a link to a legend for the original design, for which the author’s animated version does not compensate.

There isnt much point in making a competing standard as we already know what happens (more confusion, more fractured knowledge, etc.)

Instead, just print a laundry chart and leave it with the washer.

As for whitegoods manufacturers: they could, as a minimum, describe their various wash and dry settings using the appropriate symbols rather than marketing terms.

The water temp in the old one is expressed much more clearly than the new one.

The most significant improvement is the bleach/no bleach symbol. The rest either don't improve much or actually make things less legible.

Also, sidenote the "drying" symbol looks a bit like the hotsprings/onsen symbol --the official symbol is a little diff as it has an oval, but on roadsigns they drop the oval sometimes so it looks very similar (see U+2668)

The iconography is updated which is nice but the line weights are too thick.

Way too thick, overlapping and thats why probably impossible to print on most textile labal printers. I also find most of the labels looking the same - similar to when Google redesigned their icons and not everyone liked it.

https://9to5google.com/2020/10/06/gmail-logo-workspace-redes...

The flask for bleach, and the drying symbols are much clearer though.

The detail in some is a bit too high for some clothing tags, I'd agree on that.

Indeed, especially given the current nonsense is commonly unreadable already after just a wash or two (if not before you've washed the garment).

Over the last 15 years or so I think we've taken a few giant steps backwards as we let freewheeling artists take over. Yet go back to the early 80s and look at the original Macintosh UI which was designed by an artist - Susan Kare - with complete elegance and simplicity. What has happened? Just because computers have increased in speed doesn't mean the complexity of the artwork must increase proportionally - often at the expense of usability.

I propose a Moore's law of a label printing density doubling every 18 months (years?).