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I remember getting into a debate about this subject with a self-described UI expert. It was part enlightening and part frustrating. He failed to see the point t

I remember getting into a debate about this subject with a self-described UI expert. It was part enlightening and part frustrating. He failed to see the point that so many of his ideas were US-centric, and didn't make sense in any context outside of English-speaking languages, and to be honest, they barely made sense in English. The author brings up Gmail, which has an icon for "archive" that makes zero sense no matter how I try to connect the dot, but at least Gmail gives you and out: turn the confusing icons to text. Despite being a programmer -- but not front end work -- I find myself struggling more and more with UI and especially icons. I think so much of it reflects the current trend of zero empathy for the end-user. Fortunately, I know enough about computers to get around many of these issues, but icons are the one area that I still struggle with. Unless you have some site with several million users, teaching end-users is a wasted effort, and it does well to either piggy-back on other ideas or use text. Even Facebook is using text, and it seems a little odd that anyone smaller would feel they have some lessons to teach the end-user about UI. UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user." If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator. Once your user presses the back button because your icons made them feel stupid, you lost a customer, and that is a very high price for "pretty."

CamperBob2 11y ago
Here's one argument you can use against icon advocates: "The ancient Egyptians already tried hieroglyphics. They didn't work. What makes you think they will this time?" Still waiting for a good answer to this one. When someone does successfully counter it, I imagine the rebuttal will involve Chinese pictograms or something else that has worked well for a while but isn't likely to survive the next thousand years.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  (a) they're not pictograms and (b) hieroglyphs worked for thousands of years.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    (a) Yes, they are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Pictograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...). (b) So why'd the Egyptians stop using them? What makes them right for today's needs?
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      From your link, "pictograms" are glyphs that depict the objects they represent (for example, 下 directly depicts the abstract concept of "down"). Egyptian hieroglyphs, in their ornate form, clearly depict various items like reeds, birds, arms, and snakes. But those glyphs don't actually refer to the reeds, birds, arms, and snakes they show; rather, the ancient Egyptian writing system is largely alphabetic. Their formal letters were just much prettier than ours.
      - ajanuary 11y ago
        My understanding is that they were both, depending on context.
    - gotchange 11y ago
      We stopped using them because we changed the language we speak due to external factors like being conquered and dominated by foreigners who brought their language and writing system with them. It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
      - CamperBob2 11y ago
        Oh, OK. Those damn foreign imperialists again, always oppressing our hieroglyphics. I'm out. This thread is 200TB of crazy on a 10TB drive.
        gotchange 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Larrikin 11y ago
  Have you ever actually studied a language involving "pictograms" or are you just making assumptions? I didn't take Chinese long enough to get a feel for it one way or the other but in Japanese kanji will remain in the language from here until the end of the Japanese language. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and Japanese written completely phonetically is not only extremely long, but once you learn the kanji it becomes much more difficult to read and make sense of a sentence without the kanji.
  - samastur 11y ago
    I actually have studied Japanese for a while and have no clue what you are describing as extremely long. In hiragana you have 48 letters for sounds which in most cases are a consonant + vowel. Hence Japanese written in Hiragana or Katakana is shorter than it would be if it was written with a western alphabet. Japanese is probably not the language with shortest words, but neither are they exceptionally long.
    - Larrikin 11y ago
      Romaji is not in use for the most part in Japanese. Romaji would of course be much longer but I was talking about a sentence written out in only kana vs a sentence written out normally with a mixture of kanji and kana.
      - kragen 11y ago
        Usually the difference is about 30% by character count, but you can write the kana smaller before the text is too small to read.
- kragen 11y ago
  Your main point is correct — no general-purpose writing system has ever been pictographic, not even Egyptian hieroglyphs. But all of your supporting points are wrong. Egyptian hieroglyphs were in use for about 3600 years, and as other commenters pointed out, Egypt stopped using them because they were conquered by Rome, which then imposed Christianity — which banned a different kind of "icon", killing the hieroglyphs as a side effect. Also, far from being "icons" in the UI sense, Egyptian hieroglyphs were primarily phonetic, although they did have ideographic components — less so than Chinese characters (which are logographic, but only about 4% of them are pictograms) but more so than the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet, which is a modified subset of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (via the proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician abjads and the Greek, Etruscan, and Old Italic alphabets) has been in use for 2100 years, about 1500 years less than the hieroglyphs. If we're still using the Latin alphabet around AD 3400, your argument from observed adoption that alphabets work better than pictograms would make sense — if hieroglyphs were pictograms, which they mostly aren't. Every invention of writing except the khipu started out pictographic: Chinese characters (which have been in use since the Shang dynasty a bit over 3000 years ago, contrary to what you seem to think), Sumerian cuneiform, Mayan hieroglyphs, and Egyptian hieroglyphs all have clear pictographic origins. But all of them developed phonetic components in order to expand the range of language that could be written, and those phonetic components came to dominate the script almost immediately, to the point that none of them have an identifiable pictographic-only period in archaeology. In fact, as the numerical nature of the decoded khipus and much of the early Sumerian tablets suggests, logograms for abstract concepts such as numbers may have been in use as early as pictograms or even earlier. So, the actual history supports your idea that systems relying entirely on pictograms have very limited applicability, even though it has nothing in common with the history you imagined supported that idea. On the gripping hand, maybe computers are not the same medium as clay tablets and printed paper, and so maybe past experience is not entirely applicable.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Really, you describe a script which has been around at least three thousand years and is currently being used by over a billion people as "worked well for a while"? What's your basis for saying it "isn't likely to survive the next thousand years"?
potatolicious 11y ago
> "UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user."" In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap. Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed themselves UX designers - because UX designers are in greater demand - but are poorly qualified to actually assess and design for usability. There are also more and more designers crossing over from other design disciplines - graphics designers and print designers are often transitioning to UX design and the results are not always good. To some degree they can bring fresh ideas to the table, but often it results in a lot of designs that aren't competent at a usability level. > "If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator." I agree with the gist of what you're saying - but I think there needs to be a bit more nuance here. We're no longer in the 90s, the userbase for most websites and apps largely are not computer illiterate. They are in fact quite technically savvy overall - the issue isn't that your users are technologically ignorant, it's that they're not skilled in your software. If you look at the modern smartphone user they have a lot of learned expectations and behaviors and they know full well how everything works. The issue comes only when you try to break the established knowledge and do your own thing - which is exactly what the blog post here is about, icons that aren't universally established and have vague meaning to non-experts (and even some experts). One of the hardest things as frontend people is retaining the first-time-user mindset. You use your own software day in and day out and become experts at it, and your designs and considerations start swimming around that - you are more inclined to build power-user features and implement power-user shortcuts, and you gradually lose the ability to assess your own product from the perspective of a new (or even old, but irregular) user. The issue isn't that people are technologically illiterate, but that they are not specialists in a very particular expert-user UI you may have designed. This is made worse when designers start openly egging competitors' UIs, so now not only are you pursuing a confusingly non-standard UI, but this non-standardness starts becoming a meme in your specific niche. The distinction is important IMO - with the exception of a few demographics (retirees?) it's actually pretty safe now to expect a reasonable amount of tech savvy from your users, but you have to recognize what you think is universal trained user behavior vs. actually widespread user behavior.
ploxiln 11y ago
I don't think this is "zero empathy for the end-user", I think this is desperation. As companies and "product managers" get more statistical data on real-world clicks and usage and do more usability studies, they see that 90% of users don't know how to do anything. And they get desperate to "fix" that. They go for drastic re-designs, get rid of all the text because "nobody" reads it, hide all the features because they "confuse" and "intimidate" users and "nobody" uses them, and end up with something that requires a young professional software developer like me some real sleuthing to figure out, on behalf of friends and family. Then, when 95% of users don't know how to do anything, they get more desperate, and the result is even worse...
- damcedami 11y ago
  Things about users don't know anything makes me really frustrated, they just need to learn something to use new application, even changes of color can be confusing. I usually ended up with most common design my target user use.
- frik 11y ago
  UI usage statistics are often biased (power user deactivate tracking). A/B testing and watching real end users using your product is better.
  - on_and_off 11y ago
    >power user deactivate tracking Is that a thing ? I can't speak in general but I know that for the large mobile app I am working on, we are slowly migrating to our own solution and I highly doubt that users could deactivate it.
    - suneilp 11y ago
      It's about blocking google analytics (or whatever else).
    - fatratchet 11y ago
      I think it's ment in the sense that power users are by far the most likely people to disable telemetry or "Send usage data to help improve this software" functions, if such a setting is offered. Especially if the option is buried somewhere deep in the settings menu. Also the most likely users to have adblockers, though that's getting more and more common.
sandGorgon 11y ago
+1 This is a huge issue with open source software - everything seems to be named Libre- these days and I haven't found many Americans who can pronounce it...let alone people in China or India.
- Tideflat 11y ago
  There is a tendency to make names that are okay for print but hard to pronounce like X.org or XFCE.
  - mjcohen 11y ago
    "ex dot org"; "ex ef see ee". At least by me.
    - hanniabu 11y ago
      I thought the first one was trying to be fancy and be pronounced 'zorg'
    - buster 11y ago
      "ex org" and "ex face" for me
  - aptwebapps 11y ago
    IMO, NGINX has taken the blue ribbon from GNU for stupid free software name (I say this as someone who loves both). How many people here actually know that NGINX is supposed to be pronounced engine-X?
    - RobertKerans 11y ago
      I always just assumed it was like 'enjinks'; even the back end devs who deal with it.much more regularly than me call it that as well. The more you know. 'SQL' has that issue as well I suppose.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
  More than that, Libre- is a very inward-facing name. It's not AwesomeOffice, FriendlyOffice or PowerfulOffice. It's "LibreOffice", something that simply doesn't make any sense to most English speakers. The implication is "we choose this as our adjective, because we care more about our ideology than the quality of your user experience". Ok, the ideology says that "because we build our software like this, you get a better user experience", and I have a lot of sympathy with that. But by the time you have to explain the name like this, you've lost the potential user's attention. (OTOH, I also suck at software naming so probably shouldn't preach.)
gotchange 11y ago
> Even Facebook is using text, The problem with the text-only approach is that you can't change the layout or the names of the functions visible to the user in your app or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user. But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly taking into account that we humans are better equipped to identify pictograms and shapes than text very quickly and efficiently. PS: Assuming a conventional method or approach to this problem and not a hybrid or innovative one.
- the8472 11y ago
  > or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ UIs undergo changes, them staying the same for all eternity is not a promise anyone wants to make.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly FYI, this is almost certainly not true. Research suggests that users only recognise a very limited set of icons in an application, and where there are extensive toolbars full of different icons, it is often the position that the user is recognising more than the icon itself. Thus reorganising things like toolbars can have a profound negative effect on usability, and it seems likely (though I'm speculating now) that this would be much worse than something like reordering text items in a menu.
raphman_ 11y ago
Actual UI experts have been advocating Text+Icon for ages: > always include a visible text label. As Bruce Tognazzini once said, “a word is worth a thousand pictures.” https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
icc97 11y ago
I've been worrying over clicking archive vs delete for ages in Gmail now. Even though you've always got undo I'd much rather not have to click undo. I let out an internal comforting sigh once I realised I could just replace the icons with text.

CamperBob2 11y ago

Here's one argument you can use against icon advocates: "The ancient Egyptians already tried hieroglyphics. They didn't work. What makes you think they will this time?" Still waiting for a good answer to this one. When someone does successfully counter it, I imagine the rebuttal will involve Chinese pictograms or something else that has worked well for a while but isn't likely to survive the next thousand years.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
(a) they're not pictograms and (b) hieroglyphs worked for thousands of years.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  (a) Yes, they are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Pictograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...). (b) So why'd the Egyptians stop using them? What makes them right for today's needs?
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    From your link, "pictograms" are glyphs that depict the objects they represent (for example, 下 directly depicts the abstract concept of "down"). Egyptian hieroglyphs, in their ornate form, clearly depict various items like reeds, birds, arms, and snakes. But those glyphs don't actually refer to the reeds, birds, arms, and snakes they show; rather, the ancient Egyptian writing system is largely alphabetic. Their formal letters were just much prettier than ours.
    - ajanuary 11y ago
      My understanding is that they were both, depending on context.
  - gotchange 11y ago
    We stopped using them because we changed the language we speak due to external factors like being conquered and dominated by foreigners who brought their language and writing system with them. It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Oh, OK. Those damn foreign imperialists again, always oppressing our hieroglyphics. I'm out. This thread is 200TB of crazy on a 10TB drive.
      - gotchange 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Larrikin 11y ago
Have you ever actually studied a language involving "pictograms" or are you just making assumptions? I didn't take Chinese long enough to get a feel for it one way or the other but in Japanese kanji will remain in the language from here until the end of the Japanese language. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and Japanese written completely phonetically is not only extremely long, but once you learn the kanji it becomes much more difficult to read and make sense of a sentence without the kanji.
- samastur 11y ago
  I actually have studied Japanese for a while and have no clue what you are describing as extremely long. In hiragana you have 48 letters for sounds which in most cases are a consonant + vowel. Hence Japanese written in Hiragana or Katakana is shorter than it would be if it was written with a western alphabet. Japanese is probably not the language with shortest words, but neither are they exceptionally long.
  - Larrikin 11y ago
    Romaji is not in use for the most part in Japanese. Romaji would of course be much longer but I was talking about a sentence written out in only kana vs a sentence written out normally with a mixture of kanji and kana.
    - kragen 11y ago
      Usually the difference is about 30% by character count, but you can write the kana smaller before the text is too small to read.
kragen 11y ago
Your main point is correct — no general-purpose writing system has ever been pictographic, not even Egyptian hieroglyphs. But all of your supporting points are wrong. Egyptian hieroglyphs were in use for about 3600 years, and as other commenters pointed out, Egypt stopped using them because they were conquered by Rome, which then imposed Christianity — which banned a different kind of "icon", killing the hieroglyphs as a side effect. Also, far from being "icons" in the UI sense, Egyptian hieroglyphs were primarily phonetic, although they did have ideographic components — less so than Chinese characters (which are logographic, but only about 4% of them are pictograms) but more so than the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet, which is a modified subset of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (via the proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician abjads and the Greek, Etruscan, and Old Italic alphabets) has been in use for 2100 years, about 1500 years less than the hieroglyphs. If we're still using the Latin alphabet around AD 3400, your argument from observed adoption that alphabets work better than pictograms would make sense — if hieroglyphs were pictograms, which they mostly aren't. Every invention of writing except the khipu started out pictographic: Chinese characters (which have been in use since the Shang dynasty a bit over 3000 years ago, contrary to what you seem to think), Sumerian cuneiform, Mayan hieroglyphs, and Egyptian hieroglyphs all have clear pictographic origins. But all of them developed phonetic components in order to expand the range of language that could be written, and those phonetic components came to dominate the script almost immediately, to the point that none of them have an identifiable pictographic-only period in archaeology. In fact, as the numerical nature of the decoded khipus and much of the early Sumerian tablets suggests, logograms for abstract concepts such as numbers may have been in use as early as pictograms or even earlier. So, the actual history supports your idea that systems relying entirely on pictograms have very limited applicability, even though it has nothing in common with the history you imagined supported that idea. On the gripping hand, maybe computers are not the same medium as clay tablets and printed paper, and so maybe past experience is not entirely applicable.
mikeash 11y ago
Really, you describe a script which has been around at least three thousand years and is currently being used by over a billion people as "worked well for a while"? What's your basis for saying it "isn't likely to survive the next thousand years"?

potatolicious 11y ago

> "UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user."" In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap. Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed themselves UX designers - because UX designers are in greater demand - but are poorly qualified to actually assess and design for usability. There are also more and more designers crossing over from other design disciplines - graphics designers and print designers are often transitioning to UX design and the results are not always good. To some degree they can bring fresh ideas to the table, but often it results in a lot of designs that aren't competent at a usability level. > "If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator." I agree with the gist of what you're saying - but I think there needs to be a bit more nuance here. We're no longer in the 90s, the userbase for most websites and apps largely are not computer illiterate. They are in fact quite technically savvy overall - the issue isn't that your users are technologically ignorant, it's that they're not skilled in your software. If you look at the modern smartphone user they have a lot of learned expectations and behaviors and they know full well how everything works. The issue comes only when you try to break the established knowledge and do your own thing - which is exactly what the blog post here is about, icons that aren't universally established and have vague meaning to non-experts (and even some experts). One of the hardest things as frontend people is retaining the first-time-user mindset. You use your own software day in and day out and become experts at it, and your designs and considerations start swimming around that - you are more inclined to build power-user features and implement power-user shortcuts, and you gradually lose the ability to assess your own product from the perspective of a new (or even old, but irregular) user. The issue isn't that people are technologically illiterate, but that they are not specialists in a very particular expert-user UI you may have designed. This is made worse when designers start openly egging competitors' UIs, so now not only are you pursuing a confusingly non-standard UI, but this non-standardness starts becoming a meme in your specific niche. The distinction is important IMO - with the exception of a few demographics (retirees?) it's actually pretty safe now to expect a reasonable amount of tech savvy from your users, but you have to recognize what you think is universal trained user behavior vs. actually widespread user behavior.

ploxiln 11y ago

I don't think this is "zero empathy for the end-user", I think this is desperation. As companies and "product managers" get more statistical data on real-world clicks and usage and do more usability studies, they see that 90% of users don't know how to do anything. And they get desperate to "fix" that. They go for drastic re-designs, get rid of all the text because "nobody" reads it, hide all the features because they "confuse" and "intimidate" users and "nobody" uses them, and end up with something that requires a young professional software developer like me some real sleuthing to figure out, on behalf of friends and family. Then, when 95% of users don't know how to do anything, they get more desperate, and the result is even worse...

damcedami 11y ago
Things about users don't know anything makes me really frustrated, they just need to learn something to use new application, even changes of color can be confusing. I usually ended up with most common design my target user use.
frik 11y ago
UI usage statistics are often biased (power user deactivate tracking). A/B testing and watching real end users using your product is better.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  >power user deactivate tracking Is that a thing ? I can't speak in general but I know that for the large mobile app I am working on, we are slowly migrating to our own solution and I highly doubt that users could deactivate it.
  - suneilp 11y ago
    It's about blocking google analytics (or whatever else).
  - fatratchet 11y ago
    I think it's ment in the sense that power users are by far the most likely people to disable telemetry or "Send usage data to help improve this software" functions, if such a setting is offered. Especially if the option is buried somewhere deep in the settings menu. Also the most likely users to have adblockers, though that's getting more and more common.

sandGorgon 11y ago

+1 This is a huge issue with open source software - everything seems to be named Libre- these days and I haven't found many Americans who can pronounce it...let alone people in China or India.

Tideflat 11y ago
There is a tendency to make names that are okay for print but hard to pronounce like X.org or XFCE.
- mjcohen 11y ago
  "ex dot org"; "ex ef see ee". At least by me.
  - hanniabu 11y ago
    I thought the first one was trying to be fancy and be pronounced 'zorg'
  - buster 11y ago
    "ex org" and "ex face" for me
- aptwebapps 11y ago
  IMO, NGINX has taken the blue ribbon from GNU for stupid free software name (I say this as someone who loves both). How many people here actually know that NGINX is supposed to be pronounced engine-X?
  - RobertKerans 11y ago
    I always just assumed it was like 'enjinks'; even the back end devs who deal with it.much more regularly than me call it that as well. The more you know. 'SQL' has that issue as well I suppose.
Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
More than that, Libre- is a very inward-facing name. It's not AwesomeOffice, FriendlyOffice or PowerfulOffice. It's "LibreOffice", something that simply doesn't make any sense to most English speakers. The implication is "we choose this as our adjective, because we care more about our ideology than the quality of your user experience". Ok, the ideology says that "because we build our software like this, you get a better user experience", and I have a lot of sympathy with that. But by the time you have to explain the name like this, you've lost the potential user's attention. (OTOH, I also suck at software naming so probably shouldn't preach.)

gotchange 11y ago

> Even Facebook is using text, The problem with the text-only approach is that you can't change the layout or the names of the functions visible to the user in your app or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user. But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly taking into account that we humans are better equipped to identify pictograms and shapes than text very quickly and efficiently. PS: Assuming a conventional method or approach to this problem and not a hybrid or innovative one.

the8472 11y ago
> or you'd face a severe backlash or blowout from your user. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ UIs undergo changes, them staying the same for all eternity is not a promise anyone wants to make.
Silhouette 11y ago
But in the case of icons, you could still move things around and the user would find it less demanding to locate the new place of the function by identifying the pictogram quickly FYI, this is almost certainly not true. Research suggests that users only recognise a very limited set of icons in an application, and where there are extensive toolbars full of different icons, it is often the position that the user is recognising more than the icon itself. Thus reorganising things like toolbars can have a profound negative effect on usability, and it seems likely (though I'm speculating now) that this would be much worse than something like reordering text items in a menu.

raphman_ 11y ago

Actual UI experts have been advocating Text+Icon for ages: > always include a visible text label. As Bruce Tognazzini once said, “a word is worth a thousand pictures.” https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/

icc97 11y ago

I've been worrying over clicking archive vs delete for ages in Gmail now. Even though you've always got undo I'd much rather not have to click undo. I let out an internal comforting sigh once I realised I could just replace the icons with text.