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The problem is that if we modernized most of our iconography, a heck of a lot of things won't be able to be represented simply with something distinctive enough

The problem is that if we modernized most of our iconography, a heck of a lot of things won't be able to be represented simply with something distinctive enough. This is largely due to what I'll call the merging of things into the same form largely driven by computing. For example... Icon for a phone - rectangular screen Icon for a TV - rectangular screen Icon for a tablet - rectangular screen Icon for a camera - rectangular screen (with a little dot in the corner) Icon for a video recorder - rectangular screen (with a little dot in the corner) Its true that most icons refer and represent a visual form of something from a decade or more ago. But what do you replace them with that will be any better when a lot of these things have no distinctive visual form anymore?

shanselman 14y ago
Exactly, I suspect there is nothing we can replace it with. A TV with rabbit ears will always be a TV - perhaps a hundred years from now?
- jreeve 14y ago
  This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.
  - 1337p337 14y ago
    Not only that, but the author also seems annoyed by older terminology taking new meanings, as with "radio buttons", "bookmarks", and "folders". The irony here is that he has no problem calling the device he uses a "computer", despite the older definition no longer holding true, or especially referring to "files", which is certainly not a term used in the old sense. Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" rails against analogies (the source of these terms) at length, but I'm not certain that there's much validity to the argument when the new meaning of the term eclipses the old one.
  - __alexs 14y ago
    I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions. It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.
    - goblin89 14y ago
      It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between. Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0]. And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi. [0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/posts/5738172816383199778 http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...
- flomo 14y ago
  And it will always have rounded corners, long after everyone forgets what a TV tube looked like.
- drostie 14y ago
  This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these: http://drostie.org/icons.png http://drostie.org/icons.png (Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.) You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper. I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a clue, I'm trying to find last night's homework.) Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.
  - falcojr 14y ago
    I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.
    - drostie 14y ago
      I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
  - vacri 14y ago
    I like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
    - 14y ago
goblin89 14y ago
Not only that. We appear to be far better at learning the meaning of new unknown symbols than one would expect. Anecdotal evidence: when I first encountered a floppy icon, its purpose wasn't obvious to me at all, despite I've already used a floppy before. See the Chinese writing example in this thread as well. Apparently, prior knowledge of the real-world object doesn't affect usability as much as other visual features of an icon. This makes me believe that, in future, 1) younger generations won't have any trouble with icons that represent old things they'll never see; 2) icon design business is going to profit.
- iconfinder 14y ago
  "2) icon design business is going to profit." Yeah!
nollidge 14y ago
Indeed. I realize Scott's article was tongue-in-cheek, but this is all nothing to worry about. It just means that icons will have a history, an etymology, just like words, or Chinese pictograms, or, hell, even the symbols in our Latin alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
roc 14y ago
The real change is that up until now many icons got away with implying a mash-up of result, media and interaction in one clear glyph. Even when the old-school icons were developed, the result for many things was a rectangular screen. Which is why they emphasized media or trappings, which had the useful side-effect of implying interaction. (bunny ears vs film strip vs VHS tape vs film camera) As you correctly note, the problem now is that all media is digital. There are no distinctive trappings. There isn't anything to imply the interaction mode. (are you taking, browsing or sharing photos when you click on that picture icon? And when sharing, via what 'channel'? web service? email? mms?) Further, we've never really had to worry about so many of these icons in a single app or on a single device before, because it was largely inconceivable that a single thing would do all of this to any acceptable degree. Even 10 years ago, what general purpose computing platform had all the features of a modern smartphone? Including access to multiple networks and services for transferring data at varying degrees of synchronicity -- think capture video vs broadcast video vs video chat. What app was commonly used by regular people to handle capture, editing, review and multiple sharing options for both photo and video? A single glyph is simply not enough anymore. We can reasonably distinguish between text-in-a-box, still-in-a-box (cliche landscape) and video-in-a-box (stick figure with action lines). But we'll need multiple glyphs in combination to distinguish between video-to-be-streamed-down, video-to-be-broadcast, video-to-be-sent-via-email, video-to-be-captured, etc. And this won't be too difficult. To some extent we're already doing this, with arrows and combo glyphs to distinguish between things like Save/Delete/Copy/Burn/Share.
excuse-me 14y ago
I'm not sure the whole icon thing actually works. For MacPaint with 8 functions it was great. For picking one of a dozen apps on an iPhone - fine. But the last version of the 3D cad package I used had over 5000 commands - and each one of those was represented by a unique and (supposedly) intuitive icon! That's getting close to the Chinese alphabet
- evoxed 14y ago
  CAD is definitely one area where UX is so far behind it's pretty much useless. The command line is the fastest and only useful way to be productive. Rather than spend all their time coming up with icons for each little dot it sure would be nice if they'd do a little research on exploring alternative UIs (hint: simply allowing me to customize toolbars is not the answer).

shanselman 14y ago

Exactly, I suspect there is nothing we can replace it with. A TV with rabbit ears will always be a TV - perhaps a hundred years from now?

jreeve 14y ago
This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.
- 1337p337 14y ago
  Not only that, but the author also seems annoyed by older terminology taking new meanings, as with "radio buttons", "bookmarks", and "folders". The irony here is that he has no problem calling the device he uses a "computer", despite the older definition no longer holding true, or especially referring to "files", which is certainly not a term used in the old sense. Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" rails against analogies (the source of these terms) at length, but I'm not certain that there's much validity to the argument when the new meaning of the term eclipses the old one.
- __alexs 14y ago
  I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions. It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.
  - goblin89 14y ago
    It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between. Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0]. And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi. [0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/posts/5738172816383199778 http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...
flomo 14y ago
And it will always have rounded corners, long after everyone forgets what a TV tube looked like.
drostie 14y ago
This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these: http://drostie.org/icons.png http://drostie.org/icons.png (Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.) You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper. I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a clue, I'm trying to find last night's homework.) Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.
- falcojr 14y ago
  I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.
  - drostie 14y ago
    I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
- vacri 14y ago
  I like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
  - 14y ago

goblin89 14y ago

Not only that. We appear to be far better at learning the meaning of new unknown symbols than one would expect. Anecdotal evidence: when I first encountered a floppy icon, its purpose wasn't obvious to me at all, despite I've already used a floppy before. See the Chinese writing example in this thread as well. Apparently, prior knowledge of the real-world object doesn't affect usability as much as other visual features of an icon. This makes me believe that, in future, 1) younger generations won't have any trouble with icons that represent old things they'll never see; 2) icon design business is going to profit.

iconfinder 14y ago
"2) icon design business is going to profit." Yeah!

nollidge 14y ago

Indeed. I realize Scott's article was tongue-in-cheek, but this is all nothing to worry about. It just means that icons will have a history, an etymology, just like words, or Chinese pictograms, or, hell, even the symbols in our Latin alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

roc 14y ago

The real change is that up until now many icons got away with implying a mash-up of result, media and interaction in one clear glyph. Even when the old-school icons were developed, the result for many things was a rectangular screen. Which is why they emphasized media or trappings, which had the useful side-effect of implying interaction. (bunny ears vs film strip vs VHS tape vs film camera) As you correctly note, the problem now is that all media is digital. There are no distinctive trappings. There isn't anything to imply the interaction mode. (are you taking, browsing or sharing photos when you click on that picture icon? And when sharing, via what 'channel'? web service? email? mms?) Further, we've never really had to worry about so many of these icons in a single app or on a single device before, because it was largely inconceivable that a single thing would do all of this to any acceptable degree. Even 10 years ago, what general purpose computing platform had all the features of a modern smartphone? Including access to multiple networks and services for transferring data at varying degrees of synchronicity -- think capture video vs broadcast video vs video chat. What app was commonly used by regular people to handle capture, editing, review and multiple sharing options for both photo and video? A single glyph is simply not enough anymore. We can reasonably distinguish between text-in-a-box, still-in-a-box (cliche landscape) and video-in-a-box (stick figure with action lines). But we'll need multiple glyphs in combination to distinguish between video-to-be-streamed-down, video-to-be-broadcast, video-to-be-sent-via-email, video-to-be-captured, etc. And this won't be too difficult. To some extent we're already doing this, with arrows and combo glyphs to distinguish between things like Save/Delete/Copy/Burn/Share.

excuse-me 14y ago

I'm not sure the whole icon thing actually works. For MacPaint with 8 functions it was great. For picking one of a dozen apps on an iPhone - fine. But the last version of the 3D cad package I used had over 5000 commands - and each one of those was represented by a unique and (supposedly) intuitive icon! That's getting close to the Chinese alphabet

evoxed 14y ago
CAD is definitely one area where UX is so far behind it's pretty much useless. The command line is the fastest and only useful way to be productive. Rather than spend all their time coming up with icons for each little dot it sure would be nice if they'd do a little research on exploring alternative UIs (hint: simply allowing me to customize toolbars is not the answer).