Every minor redesign Github has released over the last couple of years increasingly reek of "designed by programmers". But Github deserves better than that. Please get real designers.

I could tell what buttons did simply from the text (and they were useful) e.g 'unwatch', 'your fork' etc. Now there's more space taken up with the text and the icon.

The icons don't seem to provide additional info in any way. Perhaps that's because Github would like to switch from text to icons eventually (with text+icons in the interim)? I hope not, as it would mean way too many things for people (esp novices) to get their heads around.

Like Gmail's new icon-only interface? I hope not! It's difficult enough for people to figure out what Gmail's icons represent.

It was actually useful to have a very obvious indicator that your repo was private and nobody else could see it.

There were several posts on HN over the last couple of years where people complained about these and other issues.

Github's design is not and has never been terrible. And furthermore, hiring a "real designer" will not solve the problem because the core issue is that Github is a complex product; throwing a designer in there who doesn't understand the nuances of how git is used in the wild is not going to help. There are many different audiences and many different conflicting problems to be solved. The reason there's so much meta information stacked at the top is because the meta information is more commonly used then the file contents in most cases. I agree it's not the most intuitive, but on the other hand there's not an obviously primary role for this page and things are reasonably well organized and delineated based on purpose. I've used almost every single link there and there's not much that doesn't deserve to be front and center.

As for the icon redesign, they are trying to establish a visual language so that the masses of information they are publishing are more readily digestible. This is not something that happens overnight, instead you have to use the icons for a while before they sink and start to pay dividends. I'm not saying Github is successful, but I think people on HN and indeed the Internet in general are way to quick to criticize redesigns based on first impressions.

As a non-designer, I always use text labels in my applications because I can't make good graphics/icons, but it always seems like the applications lack polish because of it. I guess there is a happy medium to be found between no icons and the strict only-ambiguous-icons like Google switched to with Android 4 and their recent web property redesigns.

Great point, especially about using + for new. They don't need to abstract the concept of a repository, they just need to abstract the concept of the Create/New action.

Their users will of course know it means to create a new repository, rather than a MS Word Document, email, sandwich, or whatever, simply based on context.

They've gotten into their heads that they need to create a new design language for version control concepts. And perhaps that's true for the Fork and Merge buttons, which are actions unique to version control, but not for everything. Create, Logoff, Notifications, etc. are not unique to version control at all. Just reuse what everyone is familiar with for those.

But from a human/usability standpoint (what actually matters), I agree that they are indeed a failure. Let's hope they're ready to use that technical prowess to iterate.

From a human/usability standpoint, most icons used in user interfaces are failures.

Not sure you believe me? Quick! Name five icons you often use in a piece of software you use regularly: your browser, IDE, spreadsheet, graphics package, whatever.

Now name five more.

If you’re like most people, you probably came up with the first five easily enough. Back, refresh, stop, home, forward. Save, print, bold, cut, paste. But by the time you were getting toward ten, were you starting to struggle?

Now consider that many of these applications line up rows of 10, 20, or even more icons, which all look rather non-descript and blurry at typical sizes anyway. Some applications have several such rows, some at different sizes, some horizontal, some vertical. That’s an awful lot of screen space for something that most users won’t use, at least not without doing the mouse-hover-tooltip-no-it’s-not-that-one-maybe-it’s-the-one-over-there thing.

Oh, and here’s the kicker: of the icons that do get widely used, only a tiny number are truly iconic pictures that are recognisable! A lot are just an arbitrary marker in a predictable position, and it’s that context that the user recognises.

A lot of this has to do with placement, yes, but I'm sure even without that, you can scan a mass of icons much more easily than a mass of text.

http://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usabili...

The article says Octicons are "a custom icon font for use on GitHub.com and GitHub products". In their companion Making Of post, they answer a question about licensing [1] by saying "The font is for GitHub use only." [2].

[1]: https://github.com/blog/1135-the-making-of-octicons#comment-...

[2]: https://github.com/blog/1135-the-making-of-octicons#comment-...