> From the early days when icons carried inherent meaning

That was never true. The icon for "print" remains something you have to learn. Even the trash can icon had to be explained before it became "intuitive".

My chrome browser has a row of icons across the top. Only the <- and -> icons are reasonably intuitive.

> Even the trash can icon had to be explained before it became "intuitive".

Legend has it that the original Mac trash can icon looked a lot like a traditional British mailbox.

Non-hilarity ensued.

I might interpret "when icons carried inherent meaning" as something like, "when the physical office desk metaphor was the only game in town". I didn't get much out of the article, but I would agree that the trajectory of icon symbology is necessarily towards the more virtual and more subtle (if that's a point the author is making...).

Using the word “intuitive” is the hallmark of a mediocre interface designer.

You can’t make an “intuitive interface”. What you can make is an interface that is familiar, and consistent, which means people can reasonably anticipate what doing something they haven’t done before will do.

(Good interfaces should also allow for mistake recovery - eg by supporting universal undo - which is something everyone seems to have forgotten)

Even arrows are not uniformly perceived across cultures as showing direction (although you can safely assume most anyone who lives in 21st century globalized modern society will have learned to decode arrows fairly early in life).

The old quote goes that “the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it’s all learned” - but that quote was clearly by someone who was never around newborns, because lots of newborns have to be guided to breastfeeding.

I'm amused by the oil pressure gauge on my car having an icon on it instead of "oil". The icon is an outline of an ancient babylon oil lamp. As if anyone unfamiliar with 5000 year old archaeology would know what it was!

I've also seen telephone icons that are an outline of a telephone that hasn't been seen since the 1950s. An outline of a modern phone isn't very distinctive.

"hark back to early video players "

I think he means audio players, but it's possible they's never seen one of the old audio tape machines...

I've seen some apps recently move to only having icons and no text label. I think Paint in Windows 11 is an example. I really dislike this as for an app I'm not using every day it takes me extra time to decipher the icon. And on desktops where screens keep getting larger I have the extra real estate for the app to be clearer.

This is connected to another UX trend I don't understand of dumbing down interfaces because too many options are "too distracting." Probably not the best forum to ask this but has anyone ever stopped using an app because they got distracted by the menu?

I frequently disable text labels in order to reclaim screen space.

Perhaps it takes a certain kind of person to decipher icons as easily as text. But of course, I don't know all of them already, and so frequently I just go on a journey of discovery by tapping random buttons to see what they do. I would say that's not an efficient way to learn a UI, but what else to do? Documentation sucks!

Lastly, the real curse of icons is forcing support people to attempt to describe, in our native tongue, the appearance of a thing, rather than its plain name. It was deceptively easy to guide a newbie by saying "now click open, then save, now go home" but nobody is going to know what the "hamburger" or "floppy disk" or "share" icons look like, so the verbal mode of communication has been hampered significantly.

Partial reply: I think getting distracted by the menu is a good thing. It really helps you get up to speed with a program. On programs like Total Commander, I know where most things are and I don't spend much time searching for them. On programs like Win11 Paint or even some games (Men of War 2 springs into my mind but others probably qualify too) I just become disorientated. Monochrome stylised white icons aren't really distinct from each other, I constantly get confused between which one is which. So I never actually "learn" the interface or get any faster at using it.

>And on desktops where screens keep getting larger I have the extra real estate for the app to be clearer.

Sadly, this is bucking the trend. More and more designers are thinking mobile and trying to cram everything into very confined spaces.

There is no dilemma, only good an bad icons. A good icon is self explanatory.

The dilemma is that as thing become more abstract, making a "self explanatory" icon requires prior knowledge of other abstract concepts from the user.

For example the cloud "obviously" means something on the internet, something like online storage, and you can derive a lot of "self explanatory" icons from there. But what about those who don't understand it?

Funnily enough, I once saw a cloud icon on a piece of software, I thing it was mapping software, I instantly though about something about the internet. It took me a bit of time to realize it was for the weather, I mean, actual clouds.

> A good icon is self explanatory.

So said the ancient Egyptian scribes, and yet they wrote a Rosetta Stone.

Is there a good icon for "save" action, that will work even for people that never see floppy disk?

One could argue if that actually makes it a less effective icon.

And it's not the only case where something similar happens:

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/90445/mail-icon-is-th...

“Self explanatory” doesn’t exist. There are only icons that people have seen before (and recognize), and those they haven’t.

On the one hand icons can be a great crutch when trying to use a program in a foreign language, on the other, humanity has spent thousands of years developing a rich system to convoy meaning that is thrown away when going to icons only. Sometimes it feels we are back to caveman level tech.

My personal pet peeve are washing instruction icons. Yes it is a simple easy to learn consistent system. None of which helps me when I am at the machine trying to decide what the hell this squiggle is trying to tell me. If I were smarter I would tape a decode sheet to my machine.

the koan is.

A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

The saying goes "a picture is worth a thousand words." I've found the exchange rate to be more dynamic. Many ideas are better put with words. Others with images. What I take issue with is the idea that words and images are in competition. Each has its own use case. Contorting an image to do the job of a word demonstrates a lack of communicative ability, and vice-versa.

In case you're near a printer right now, the poster you'll find on this page[1] is taped by my washer and I've found it quite helpful!

[1] https://www.parkersdrycleaners.com/2011/05/care-label-tags/

Note: No endorsement of, or affiliation with Parker's Dry Cleaners.

Washing instructions are internationally standardized though, and if you really wanted to you'd look them on your phone.

I don't want a hippy brand to write a 50 lines poem instead. Nor do I want "woogie boogie wash only" jargonning that felt cute to the copy righter, nor do I want to try to understand the Indian instructions.

English is the official language of India.

This is a solved problem. When using an icon that isn't universally understood on a given computing platform (desktop, web, or mobile OS) you have to use a text label. When it doubt, don't use an icon alone.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/

Amazing how such basic common sense got lost sometime in the past 15 years. Perhaps using an icon for a 3-5 word phrase describing an abstract idea is daft? Wow! Who would have thought?! (Answer: certainly not any so-called "UX designer" I've met in the past 10 years.)

This is before you even get to the dumbness that ensues by the UX designers getting confused to whether a button that is a toggle should have the icon representing the current state, or the state that clicking it will cause to happen, like every other button in existence. (Think of the Mute button in every videoconferencing app -- at least Zoom still has a text label on it though!)

I love the gas pump with a right-pointing arrow icon in the dashboard. Does it mean:

1. The gas pump goes on the right side of the car?

2. The gas pump goes on the left side of the car, and the hose goes to the right into the fuel inlet?

I've recently had to learn Jira, and holy cow the iconography (and really whole UI/UX) is awful. I have to expand the left panel and waste a crap ton of real estate on an already way overcrowded page to get textual labels instead of icons consisting of variously arranged boxes. Horizontal boxes = backlog. Vertical boxes = active sprints. Stacked shrinking boxes = releases. Of course, they're all single-color outlines with little visual distinction between them all. Who thought of this? What would have been so awful with just words or even abbreviations? Heck, why does this even need to be in an almost completely empty sidebar instead of using the dead space in the top navbar?

> Stacked shrinking boxes

I think that one is meant to be a ship.

Indeed it is, but when you double down on minimalism this hard, then "stacked shrinking boxes" are all you're gonna get.

Icons are hard once you get past very ordinary operations. Here's someone powering up an electric locomotive. Large physical buttons with very specialized icons.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/IQKDtw0llNE?t=217

The use of icons lies not in understanding it the first time, it’s something that you learn to recognise. And that makes them more recognisable at the long term, or easier to find in moments when speed is of the essence. Like your example of the train. A conductor learned what they meant and trained with them. Just like a dj knows what every icon on his dj table means.

That also means icons don’t have to make sense visually, they just need to be recognised and distinguished.

Text is for when you have time or no idea, icons are for when you have to decide quick and you understand what you are doing.

> easier to find in moments when speed is of the essence

This is, for me, categorically untrue, it's quite the opposite. I am sure it must vary from person to person. I find myself wondering whether people tolerate or like icons-only because they would find the actual reading of an array of text buttons fatiguing. I'm not better than someone who finds reading more time consuming or difficult than I do, but I do kind of resent that UIs appear to be designed to cater to the less literate, because of how slow it is for me to pick the correct icon out of 7 very similar ones.

It's especially bad because these should just be preferences. Give me text and lose the icons altogether. Others should be free to have icons.

In the case of the interface shown in the train video, the key thing the operator will rely on is the fixed physical position of the controls first, then their shape, dimension, and color.

The icons really aren’t going to matter as much. And I’d argue they’d probably be better off replaced by text labels. Imagine a new operator in a stressful situation being guided eg on the phone - how would you describe to them which of the 2 buttons with a center arrow with a curve to their right they should press, for the control panel at 4:31? You’ll end up saying “the center left/right button”, or “the one above the green P button” because those icons are pretty hard to distinguish.

Swap the icons between 2 controls one day, and watch even the most skilled operator make mistakes.

Interesting. I read this whole thing. And there wasn't one picture/example/icon in it. Just words. If ever there was a case for a "few pictures might have been worth a lot of words", this was it.

I learned the hard way, that iconic UI is probably not the best way to go.

But designers pretty much insist on it, these days, and fun, ensues (and sometimes, F*kN sues).

I have found the best UI, is UI that gets out of the way, and doesn't call attention to itself. There's a reason that waitstaff usually wear black.

An example: I designed this really clever Swift UIKit widget (not SwiftUI)[0].

I keep trying to use it in my projects, and keep removing it, because it's too "in your face."

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner

> A floppy disk icon for the “save” function is a classic example

As with written characters, meaning drifts over time. I don't know if it's as much a 'dilemma' as an intrinsic aspect of existence.

> How do you devise an icon for “load language model”, for instance?

In the words of Eleanor Shellstrop, "No, it's annoying, and I'm right not to."

Not everything -- not even close to everything -- should be an icon at all.

Looking up at my browser toolbar, I can count several icons that are so abstract that I can't remember what they do without wasting about 4 seconds on each button waiting for a tooltip. Some "UX Designer" thought it was important to not label icons, because of either aesthetic "elegance" or space worries, and as a result they've wasted a 3-inch strip of space with 4 icons that I'll never use. If they'd used text or labeled-icon buttons, they could have fit the top 2 functions. Same situation but even more intense with VS Code. So fun to teach someone how to use this by speaking to them. "Click the button with the three tiny circles connected by lines." "In the Find window, click the button with three uneven horizontal lines." (Obviously that conveys "Find in selection" right? Much better than those 3 words with a checkbox!) Or in that same UI, how about "Letters 'ab' relaxing in a boat made of a knocked-over square bracket" icon?

I don't get it. This absolute trash style of UI wasn't needed in order for us to get advanced and detailed tasks done on 9" 512x384 4:3 screens. I have a 4K screen and plenty of space and every desktop app seems to think the most important thing is squeezing its entire UI into a tiny strip or floating bar.

I agree with you.

There's a reason so few modern languages are pictographic.

Not only that, modern phonetic alphabets evolved from pictographic text! Today we're devolving back to pictograms.

Apparently, the fear is that some pre-contact tribe in the Amazon rainforest would not understand the labels on a car's controls.

I've been saying this for years, and gained no traction. Finally, a fellow traveler! Have plenty of upvotes!

Your browser probably has two toolbars, one as these shortcut icons is probably on either side to your URL bar. The icons to the left of you URL bar, you are most likely deeply familiar with, so familiar in fact you know their functionality better than if they were worded out with “Back“, “Forward”, or “Reload” (this is 100x true if your browser is in a non-english language; even if that language is your native language). The buttons inside your URL bar are probably more complicated, you probably know what one or two do, maybe if they were replaced by text you could get better of a hint, but if you use them ones, you will probably know what they do afterwards just as well as if they were replaced by text. The icons on the right are probably some branded icons with unique functions that you have installed as plugins. You know what they do because of the brand, this would be equally true of text, and finally you have the hamburger (or the vertical ellipsis). At this point the hamburger (or the vertical ellipsis) has pretty well earned its place among the pause icon on your tape-deck (or, more likely, your VLC digital media player) as a universally recognizable icon.

Now your second toolbar is probably hidden by some hover or keyboard action (in my browser it is reviled by a single press of my left alt key) it is all text and has numerous categories such as view, bookmarks, help, tools, etc. inside these categories there are functions such as copy, synced tabs, troubleshoot, etc. (mine is actually in Icelandic and many of those words I’m seeing for the first time and have no clue what they mean).

If your app has only a few functions putting the correct icon next to the function label can help you navigate to your desired function more easily. If your app has a lot of functions (like your browser, or a document processor) all these icons will be an overkill, so you only design an icon for the most essential/most used functions (back, zoom in, boldface, undo, etc.). If loading a language model is an essential feature in your app, which is often performed, it may help users to have an icon next to the label (and sometimes even in place of the label if the label is complicated). Personally for “load language model” I probably would just use the upload icon (commonly an arrow pointing upwards from a bucket).

One issue is the trend to monochrome icons (which makes everything look the same), which in turn is linked to the use of vector graphics for resolution independence. When everything was low-DPI, pixel-based icons could be much more expressive, and often had more detail than current vector icon sets.

Random example: https://www.techonthenet.com/excel/macros/images/checkbox2_0...

I'm getting an "access denied" message on your example

I now linked to the containing web page instead of directly linking the image, I hope that helps.

> (on the Macintosh) The technology was groundbreaking at the time, yet she found icons that enhanced the usability of the (then) groundbreaking tech.

Wrong. The Xerox Star broke the ground for icons. Dave Smith was the person who came up with the concept.