6 ms·

I've said it over and over again: I speak english, not pictogram. The only platform I've ever seen that got icons right was Windows Phone, because it had a ha

by Pxtl 9y ago

I've said it over and over again: I speak english, not pictogram. The only platform I've ever seen that got icons right was Windows Phone, because it had a hard-coded "..." button that always did the same thing: 1) Show all the labels, and 2) Show all the additional text-labeled (non-icon) actions that were hidden by default. So the first thing you did when faced with an unfamiliar set of icons was touch the "..." button which showed you the full list of things you could do.

ScoutOrgo 9y ago
It really is frustrating using new software for work that has only icons with ~3 second hover delay of showing the action label.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  Worse on mobile where you can't hover.
  - vcpnt51 9y ago
    On Android you can long press the button and you get a tooltip. It works as long as the app isn't using custom UI elements.
Mithorium 9y ago
I was interested to see what that looked like and found Opening down: http://www.mobiletechworld.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Appbarstitch.jpg http://www.mobiletechworld.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/... Opening up: http://i.stack.imgur.com/gZdjo.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/gZdjo.png I like it
- vcpnt51 9y ago
  First is WP 8, second is Windows 10. They have nothing to do with each other.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  The one I'm talking a about is the first link. That's how it was in WP7 and 8.
rmorey 9y ago
I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost
- exergy 9y ago
  Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool. On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place. Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors. I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away. [1] http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-inte...
  - 9y ago
tikwidd 9y ago
You can implement something like this on web using Office UI Fabric[1]. [1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/components/commandbar https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/components/com...
wlesieutre 9y ago
I do speak pictogram, but only the ones with previously established meanings. Bathroom sign? No problem. Box with a down arrow, no. But I do know Apple's "bankers box" icon for archive. Having seen actual boxes like that for archiving old papers, combined with having used Mail for years, it makes sense to me. That first part though, where I know what a bankers box is used for, really helps make the icon connect. I think this is important, but at the same time, it's difficult because it's not universal. The "floppy disk" save icon has already turned into an arbitrary symbol for younger generations, and I expect the bankers box is well on its way (if not there already). Maybe FBI evidence rooms in TV shows will help it hold out. Floppy disk has an advantage because at least it's consistent across a ton of software. If you make up an icon and use it in one interface and then redesign that interface again in 4 years, you have a much harder time getting people to attach meaning to it consistently. It's the visual equivalent of a text button with "Mloroab" on it. Yeah I speak English, but I don't know what that does.
- tssva 9y ago
  Except they haven't used it in one product and a redesign. That is the standard archive icon on Android where it is used by a multitude of apps and millions of people daily.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Ah I haven't been on Android for a couple of years so I wasn't familiar with it. Having said that, I still think Apple's version is a clearer design.
invalidusernam3 9y ago
BitBucket also hides labels by default: https://i.imgur.com/2OQxliT.png https://i.imgur.com/2OQxliT.png One sorry soul at my work hadn't realised you can expand the sidebar to reveal the labels. Watching him trying to find everything was quite amusing
- alexbecker 9y ago
  Atlassian is the king of indecipherable symbols. My JIRA navigation strategies are: - Hover over each symbol one-by-one until tooltip shows itself (sometimes takes multiple tries); or - Google "how to find X in JIRA"
  - hinkley 9y ago
    My brain cannot tell the difference between the Jira and confluence favicons. I am forever clicking on the wrong browser tab.
    - alexbecker 9y ago
      Remember when they redesigned them to look more like each other? That was great.
      - hinkley 9y ago
        It was really tremendous. Truly a Day among days.
  - anitil 9y ago
    I manage to come away feeling like an idiot every time I open JIRA. I just typed out a typical internal monologue while using it, and deleted it because I'm embarrassed by it.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    I think the symbol that looks like a nut with the threaded hole off centre is the "Google how to find X in JIRA" icon. (No, not the "Tests" icon, its got the hole slightly off centre to the left. Or the "Calendar" icon, its fo the hole slightly off centre to the upper left.)
Trav5 9y ago
Androids physical menu button let you get to all the options regardless of the app you were using. I really miss that.
dosy 9y ago
Exactly. Human language invented by speakers actually communicating over critical issues (trade, war, sex) over thousands of years. Don't trust a single set of new glyphs, cobbled together by designers, basically unilaterally compared to a huge marketplace of speakers, whose purpose is not necessarily to communicate, but sometimes, "to look good" or "match aesthetic" of the context. Something developed without the same selective pressure cannot be trusted the same to be as effective.
V-2 9y ago
But "..." is English (and multiple other languages), not an icon.

by Pxtl 9y ago

ScoutOrgo 9y ago

It really is frustrating using new software for work that has only icons with ~3 second hover delay of showing the action label.

Pxtl 9y ago
Worse on mobile where you can't hover.
- vcpnt51 9y ago
  On Android you can long press the button and you get a tooltip. It works as long as the app isn't using custom UI elements.

Mithorium 9y ago

I was interested to see what that looked like and found Opening down: http://www.mobiletechworld.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Appbarstitch.jpg http://www.mobiletechworld.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/... Opening up: http://i.stack.imgur.com/gZdjo.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/gZdjo.png I like it

vcpnt51 9y ago
First is WP 8, second is Windows 10. They have nothing to do with each other.
Pxtl 9y ago
The one I'm talking a about is the first link. That's how it was in WP7 and 8.

rmorey 9y ago

I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost

exergy 9y ago
Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool. On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place. Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors. I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away. [1] http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-inte...
- 9y ago

tikwidd 9y ago

You can implement something like this on web using Office UI Fabric[1]. [1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/components/commandbar https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/components/com...

wlesieutre 9y ago

I do speak pictogram, but only the ones with previously established meanings. Bathroom sign? No problem. Box with a down arrow, no. But I do know Apple's "bankers box" icon for archive. Having seen actual boxes like that for archiving old papers, combined with having used Mail for years, it makes sense to me. That first part though, where I know what a bankers box is used for, really helps make the icon connect. I think this is important, but at the same time, it's difficult because it's not universal. The "floppy disk" save icon has already turned into an arbitrary symbol for younger generations, and I expect the bankers box is well on its way (if not there already). Maybe FBI evidence rooms in TV shows will help it hold out. Floppy disk has an advantage because at least it's consistent across a ton of software. If you make up an icon and use it in one interface and then redesign that interface again in 4 years, you have a much harder time getting people to attach meaning to it consistently. It's the visual equivalent of a text button with "Mloroab" on it. Yeah I speak English, but I don't know what that does.

tssva 9y ago
Except they haven't used it in one product and a redesign. That is the standard archive icon on Android where it is used by a multitude of apps and millions of people daily.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Ah I haven't been on Android for a couple of years so I wasn't familiar with it. Having said that, I still think Apple's version is a clearer design.

invalidusernam3 9y ago

BitBucket also hides labels by default: https://i.imgur.com/2OQxliT.png https://i.imgur.com/2OQxliT.png One sorry soul at my work hadn't realised you can expand the sidebar to reveal the labels. Watching him trying to find everything was quite amusing

alexbecker 9y ago
Atlassian is the king of indecipherable symbols. My JIRA navigation strategies are: - Hover over each symbol one-by-one until tooltip shows itself (sometimes takes multiple tries); or - Google "how to find X in JIRA"
- hinkley 9y ago
  My brain cannot tell the difference between the Jira and confluence favicons. I am forever clicking on the wrong browser tab.
  - alexbecker 9y ago
    Remember when they redesigned them to look more like each other? That was great.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      It was really tremendous. Truly a Day among days.
- anitil 9y ago
  I manage to come away feeling like an idiot every time I open JIRA. I just typed out a typical internal monologue while using it, and deleted it because I'm embarrassed by it.
- bigiain 9y ago
  I think the symbol that looks like a nut with the threaded hole off centre is the "Google how to find X in JIRA" icon. (No, not the "Tests" icon, its got the hole slightly off centre to the left. Or the "Calendar" icon, its fo the hole slightly off centre to the upper left.)

Trav5 9y ago

Androids physical menu button let you get to all the options regardless of the app you were using. I really miss that.

dosy 9y ago

Exactly. Human language invented by speakers actually communicating over critical issues (trade, war, sex) over thousands of years. Don't trust a single set of new glyphs, cobbled together by designers, basically unilaterally compared to a huge marketplace of speakers, whose purpose is not necessarily to communicate, but sometimes, "to look good" or "match aesthetic" of the context. Something developed without the same selective pressure cannot be trusted the same to be as effective.

V-2 9y ago

But "..." is English (and multiple other languages), not an icon.