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Icons are a bad idea. Words for short commands work better. In the olden days some UIs let you hide icon images and display the alt text instead. Those were ver
by abraxas 6y ago
Icons are a bad idea. Words for short commands work better. In the olden days some UIs let you hide icon images and display the alt text instead. Those were very good UIs.
- Svip 6y agoMy knee-jerk instinct was to respond with 'but what about UIs in other languages?' But then I checked Fastmail's solution of the same problem as Gmail's, which I have in Danish. Not because I am not comfortable with English, but I have come to appreciate when people actually bother to translate their UI to my language. And their solution is straight forward; keep a few buttons for the most common actions with an icon along with text indicating what the button does. For further commands, a dropdown is available where all the commands are merely text. Because usually the problem would have been to design a UI with interface constrains around the size of the text in English, but then »indlæs« (load) turns out to be just a little wider than your box had allocated. But keeping the flexible is the solution (and thus minimise its number).