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The sales pitch for icons is that they can be better than words for some purposes. The play/pause icons on a miniature Japanese cassette player are a good exam
by robotresearcher 5y ago
The sales pitch for icons is that they can be better than words for some purposes.
The play/pause icons on a miniature Japanese cassette player are a good example. No need for localization, efficient use of space, learn them in a couple of interactions. Now universal.
‘Icons are good sometimes’ is not a spit on words.
I’ll happily concede that icons are hard to look up. Tooltips are a smart mitigation for this problem, where available.
- WalterBright 5y ago> The play/pause icons Arrows are indeed icons that work. The square for "stop" - how is that intuitive?
- robotresearcher 5y agoNot harder to learn than ‘stop/parar/arreter/halt’ Even with a dictionary in front of me I’m not sure which German word is right for stopping music. But I know the icon for a German-localized device. If you move the Safari icon out of the shortcut dock so you can read the word ‘Safari’ it would still not suggest ‘web browser’ to a noob. Pros and cons. And discoverability has definitely moved backwards since the classic Mac desktop.
- WalterBright 5y ago> Even with a dictionary in front of me I’m not sure which German word is right for stopping music That's because to learn what a word means, you use a German->English dictionary. If you want to learn what the German word is for stop, you use an English-German dictionary, and this is not relevant for labels in German. > Safari At least I could look it up in the index of the manual. Or I could ask "What is Safari?" when I call tech support. > Pros and cons Definitely. But the main Pro seems to be "it looks pretty" along with misguided virtue signalling. Plenty, plenty cons.