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In Defense of Text Labels
- sillywalk 2y agoI very much agree with this. As an example, I look at the Markup Toolbar in MacOS, and I have no idea what those icons mean until I've tried using the tools. They're so similar, vague and monochrome.
- Hizonner 2y agoMost of the world switched to phonetic scripts a long time ago. That's be because they're strictly superior to pictograms. Icons are optional. Text is required. Sorry if you have to translate it.
- greggsy 2y agoAlso, text is literally just funny shapes that are used to communicate.
- echoangle 2y agoHow are they strictly superior? Here are at least two reasons where icons are better: Speed of recognition and needed Space (especially width).
- DecentShoes 2y agoBut that's just not true. If I have to sit there trying to figure out what an icon means, that's not faster than just reading the word.
- echoangle 2y agoNot when you first open the program, but for advanced users, absolutely.
- wpm 2y agoHow and why would I become an advanced user of a program I can't figure out how to use because none of the buttons have labels? Pixelmator Pro shows you the names of the tool buttons, once, when you first launch the app. They disappear the moment you click a button. Nice. a whole 10 seconds to memorize all two dozen of them. And they chose not to use the system tooltip on hover, so I have to wait for some humungous pictorial tooltip to load in when all I want to know is the goddamn hotkey.
- echoangle 2y agoHow does that matter for the point? You can make it a setting for the user or just always show both. I never said that programs should exclusively use icons. The initial claim was that text is strictly superior to icons, which means that icons have not a single thing they’re better at then text. That’s just plainly false.
- layer8 2y agoThat’s rarely the case, in my experience, especially when there are a dozen monochrome icons in a row. They just aren’t distinct or memorable enough. You learn their position after a while, but confirming the correct item by their pictogram remains slower than just reading a word or two, because the words are universal, whereas the pictograms are typically specific to the application.
- alexvitkov 2y agoKeyboard shortcuts are a feature for advanced users, not pictures.
- andybak 2y agoFor some definitions of "advanced". I use dozens of apps regularly enough to not be a beginner but not so much that I know their keyboard shortcuts. Icons have a role.
- echoangle 2y agoGood luck learning keyboard shortcuts for every feature of a CAD tool. I understand Boolean modifiers from symbols faster than I can read them, but I’m not going to memorize every shortcut for stuff like that.
- crackalamoo 2y agoI think the commenter you're replying to might have been referring to pictograms like many Chinese characters, not icons that you have to figure out. Or maybe not
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> pictograms like many Chinese characters A handful of Chinese characters are pictograms. As far as I recall, it is by far the smallest class of characters, and all of them, including the ones that started as pictograms, are treated by modern readers as phonetic indicators. Compare e.g. 象 to https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/33_E87E.svg https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/33_E87E.svg . They are the same character. Does that help you if you're looking at 象?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LocalH 2y agoI glance at a word and instantly (other than eye-to-brain processing delay) know what the word is. Icons that aren't the absolute most common take longer for me to parse.
- echoangle 2y agoAs long as some people are different that you, it’s still not strictly superior though. If some people are better with icons, you still have to do a tradeoff.
- LocalH 2y agoIt's almost like options are good. Let people have the option of icon-dominant or text-dominant UIs. But we all know many modern designers don't know the value of giving the user choice (or aren't given the agency to do so by their employers).
- crazygringo 2y agoThis is obviously not true. You don't need a label to say "Close" next to the "X" on your window. Or "Play" next to a right-facing triangle in your media player. Or the word "Search" next to a text box with a magnifying glass in it. We have certain "pictograms" that are just as widely understood as letters themselves. There is a spectrum from widely-understood symbols that don't need labels, to totally ambiguous/confusing/custom symbols that are helped greatly by labels. That said, I agree with the article that right now, a lot of apps could benefit from more labels rather than less.
- cyberax 2y ago> Or "Play" next to a right-facing triangle in your media player. That's a good example. I love text buttons because they are _larger_. > Or the word "Search" next to a text box with a magnifying glass in it. And here I _definitely_ disagree. I hate the search interfaces that are hidden behind a small icon somewhere.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoTry to keep going though. Close. Play. Search. Pause. Stop. Fast forward. I'm guessing you can name a few more, and you might get a group of people to agree about 15 are super obvious and generally accepted. It's a tiny number.
- mrandish 2y agoI agree. Maybe I'd add the three horizontal line 'hamburger' for menu, folder, plus sign for 'create new" and directional arrows for back/forward. Maybe around a dozen all in but that's about it. Anything else should have words. Instead, I find myself trying to puzzle out what the hell some cryptic pictogram means, very frustrating. I also have really come to despise this trend of not visually signifying that an icon is a pressable button.
- tristramb 2y agoText is in a sense universal. At least within a particular language. It is not tied to a particular app or operating system. You can interpret it using the same mechanism that you use to interpret a book, the label of a bottle of wine, or the name on a gravestone.
- xeonmc 2y agoObsidianMD is probably the biggest offender, it's completely unusable to me thanks to their aggressive iconification and aEsTHEtic low-contrast interface.
- layer8 2y agoSame for me, due to the low contrast in particular.
- saint_yossarian 2y agoSwitch to a high-contrast theme then?
- teddyh 2y agoA.k.a. Mystery meat navigation: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mystery_meat_navigation&oldid=1236240223 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mystery_meat_navi...>
- layer8 2y agoBalance is important. For example, having some icons in a menu provides anchor points and gives the menu a distinct “shape”: http://colfinder.net/materials/Supporting_Distance_Education_Through_Policy_Development/skill/word/filemclr.jpg http://colfinder.net/materials/Supporting_Distance_Education... But when every menu item has an icon, it’s all just a blur: https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/gitlab/original/3X/6/3/634da24a10f5bdc7266a53810636a78353ecef12.png https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/gitlab/original/3X/6/3/634da24...
- ranger207 2y agoI prefer every item having both text and an icon. If I don't know what the icon mean, there's text there to explain it. If I do know what the icon means, i can scan just the icons and find what I need faster. In my opinion it's the best of both worlds. That being said, your first example might be even better, because a lot of those things like "close" or "versions" I'm not going to be clicking often, so if they had an icon I'd have to read the text to figure them out every time anyway
- olejorgenb 2y agoBut it's not as compact as icons only, which to me is the main advantage of icons. All icon buttons should have hover text with the command name of course.
- radicality 2y agoSame for me. In case it’s useful to someone, in many native Mac apps you can get the main toolbar to show both. Try right-clicking on the toolbar -> Customize Toolbar -> Icon and Text. Doesn’t work everywhere though, but still super useful to me, I enable it whenever I can.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoI am wondering why I agree with you! I think because the shape creates landmarks. This is why some cities are easier to navigate than others. You need some stuff to be different.
- guelo 2y agoJetbrains just did a redesign of their IDEs to "minimize distractions", it's basically just iconifying everything in the sidebars. I gave it two months to see if it would stick but it hasn't. It's added friction every time I have to hunt for the icons.
- juped 2y agoI really should have cancelled over it, even if they mollified me with the ability to inconveniently disable it
- bolognafairy 2y agoOften cited by people on this website as “designers dumbing down user interfaces” but I assure you that this is easily predominantly perpetrated by “i can do UX too, I know what’s best” developers. I say this as a developer, and as someone that’s never identified or worked on paper as a ‘designer’. I lead a team of developers, and we usually have no designer input unfortunately. It’s all us. My team OFTEN tries to “just use an icon” for something, and I almost always pull the back from this. It seldom works. It’s almost always confusing for people. Text all the way.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago“Devs doing design” are absolutely largely responsible, but on the design side of things there’s also been a tidal wave of non-UI designers who've washed onto the shores of UI/UX design in the past decade+ which I believe are just as culpable. They’re great at making UIs that look amazing on a promo page but the usability of their products leave much to be desired.
- int_19h 2y agoDevs, for the most part, are just trying to ape the "good" design that they see in popular apps. The source of it is still UX designers, though.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoThough it’s decayed somewhat in recent releases, I think the Cocoa/AppKit toolbar widget is a great example of how all parties can be made happy. Right-click any standard Mac app toolbar and you get options for text + icons or icons only as well as sometimes the option to shrink the toolbar items (depending on the app). So when a user first starts using an app, they might leave it on the default of text+icons, but once they’ve used it long enough to build familiarity they can elect to hide the text and shrink the icons to save screen real estate if they want to. Unfortunately it’s become the norm for toolbars to have zero adjustability, a trend that I feel was mostly popularized by Chrome, which has had a mostly static toolbar since its inception.
- bluedino 2y agoI couldn't find an app that I have open right now that still uses the Cocoa toolbar widget.
- dceddia 2y agoChrome allowed hiding the extensions and the “current profile” icon until a handful of years ago (hmm maybe 6?). I remember because I was recording screencasts and I’d turn all the stuff off to keep it clean, and I was so mad when they introduced the change where you couldn’t turn off those icons anymore. Still kinda salty about it.
- wpm 2y agoThere's sometimes a third option in there for "text" only. Can be nice in some cases. A lot of times, if the dev didn't put the text only option in, you can force it by setting the NSToolbar's prefs in that app's CFPreferences plist.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoText on Web pages can be found with ctrl-f too which I use almost daily to deal with Web UIs!
- BrenBarn 2y agoI think this one form of a slightly more general issue which is the belief that good UX (or even "good ways of doing things" in some broader sense) should not require verbal explanation. This is seen in various kinds of "streamlined" interfaces that attempt to make things "obvious" or "intuitive", but often this comes at the cost of functionality. Icons are fine if you only have a few simple things you want to do, but when you have more potential actions and/or those actions are more complex, you start to need more explanation of what you're doing and how you're doing it, and for that you need words.
- xg15 2y agoThe irony is that those UIs usually end up needing even more elaborate explanations - they just hide them away in "new feature" popups that are shown exactly once, usually at the worst possible time, then are gone forever.
- BrenBarn 2y agoYeah. Also they often wind up trading "no explanation needed for the most common use case" for "incredibly involved explanation needed for any other use case" (or even "all other use cases are unsupported").
- xg15 2y agoI'd like to extend this to "In defense of having a consistently organized UI and menu structure and not throwing icon-only buttons, text-only buttons, right-click menus, mouseover menus and '...'/'hamburger' menus randomly all over the UI." Notable examples would be MS Teams and the YouTube app, but almost every modern app seems to do that to some degree.
- quectophoton 2y agoYou forgot GitHub: One hamburger menu on the top left, with things related to your account, like repositories or the GitHub marketplace. One hamburger menu on the top right (using your profile picture instead of the hamburger icon), with things related to your account, like repositories or the GitHub website. And between those two menus there's no-man's-land.
- linguae 2y agoThis reminds me of what I’ve read about the Xerox Mesa/Cedar environment, which in turn influenced the look and feel of Wirth’s Project Oberon and the acme text editor from Plan 9 from Bell Labs. I also have a copy of Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, and while I haven’t fully read the book, I remember it advocating the use of text over the use of icons.
- calderwoodra 2y agoIf I had a dollar for every time I had to teach someone how to share screen in Google Meets... In Google's defense, text labels are hard for i18n, but icons without text is low effort, bad UX too.
- xg15 2y agoThe meanings of icons can also be highly dependant on culture, we just tend to ignore those dependencies easier than with text.
- esafak 2y agoAnd they'll never know people are struggling. How would they?
- fedorareis 2y agoBut if they are doing accessibility they have to create alt text for the icons anyway and that needs to be translated. So the only i18n complexity left would the ltr vs rtl languages and depending on how you place the text they wouldn’t need to really change the layout to accommodate both.
- calderwoodra 2y agoAs someone who's done a fair amount of frontend work, the hard part is always squeezing text into a clean UX. The problem language is usually German, so if you have copy like "share screen", you have to find a way to fit in 12 (2x English) 'M' characters comfortably.
- kmstout 2y ago$ aspell dump master | egrep -i '^i.{18}n$' institutionalization internationalization
- card_zero 2y agoThey're institutionalized into replacing text with icons.
- russellbeattie 2y agoMy rule for user interfaces: A GUI is as good as it is easy to help someone use it verbally. The best interfaces have unique handles, names and minimal hidden features. The interface doesn't necessarily need to have tons of labels, but everything on a screen should be identifiable by name. If you can guide someone through an app while sitting next to them, or over the phone, it's a good GUI. If you have to say, "The grey thing on the left. No, the other one. In the box. It's a rectangle with a sort of an arrow thing," then that's a sign the UI sucks.
- EdwardDiego 2y agoThat is a brilliant rule for GUI evaluation "Could I guide my Nana through your app over the phone?" - Beattie's Law of UI
- eviks 2y agoI'd also defend the text from the emptiness. In the Magnolia evoke example the text label is small while there is plenty of space around. Also, you can go on the attack with text and make it rich! Bold / emphasising individual letters with colors to make all those visual scan easier. Though the ultimate solution is allowing easy user choice of both to override whatever mistakes the designers made, and at an "OS level", so that a user could use a single identical icon for "Export" and avoid the mentioned per-app inconsistency. But that will have to wait until the fantasy era of UI design arrives > We’ve spent our lives learning to recognize words instantly, while most app icons require new visual vocabulary. Unfortunarely we haven't reached that level of magic reading skills despite spending a part of our early lives learning to... well, also not instant recognition. > Scanning text is fundamentally easier than scanning icons. A stacked list of text requires only a one-directional scan (top-to-bottom), while icon grids demand bi-directional scanning (top-to-bottom and left-to-right). But this is a fundamental mistake, besides the fact that icons take less space, so "efficiency" is higher, you can recognize familiar shapes/positioning without full per icon scanning
- puzzledobserver 2y agoI agree that over-reliance on pictograms frequently causes confusion. I remember reading an article some time ago about European vs North American traffic signs. The article was praising the European system that relies more heavily on icons over the North American system which is more text-heavy. I can't remember the details now, but I remember disagreeing vehemently with the article. I find many of the traffic icons (particularly the ones indicating something about parking, stopping and one-way streets) very unintuitive. I strongly prefer the text-heavy signage that I see in the US.
- marcosdumay 2y agoPeople literally take courses on the meaning of the traffic icons. That's why they are not confusing. If people take courses on the meaning of the icons on your software's menu, and you need to save every millisecond from them recognizing the items, that's the way to go. If both don't apply to you, you should do something different.
- lucumo 2y agoIt's not really accurate to call them the "European system". These signs are used in many countries. Which also immediately tells you why icons are more useful than text: language barriers. Where the US is one big area with a single language, that's not the case in the rest of the world. Processing words in a foreign language takes longer than just seeing the same traffic signs in a slight variation. As for intuitiveness. I don't know, I kind of subscribe to the notion that the only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned. What people call intuitive is just familiarity. The traffic signs are easy to get familiar with if you grow up with them. A systems-minded (or traffic-interested) kid can easily learn the meaning of most traffic signs long before they can read fast enough.
- numpad0 2y agoThey have to have pictograms in Europe because of things like emergency stop buttons marked "NOT" in Germany[0], on top of having dozen different languages. They need a system that is deliberately disconnected from languages, ideally but optionally corrected for biases. North America can just get away with text labels because en_US is dominant in NA and learning curve for HMIs in English is flat as it gets. 0: Naturally, means emergency. If you think that's odd, English "emergency" is also just "arising" if taken literal. Emerging what?
- foobarbecue 2y agoI have always hated icons and their proliferation. I advocate for text, but it usually falls on deaf ears. I've been wondering why and recently hit on a new hypothesis: many people are slow readers. It takes me about a second to read all of the labels in a typical menu column, if I'm familiar with what sort of things might be in the menu. I'm starting to realize this is not true for everyone. For me, there is never a time when it's faster to interpret an icon than text. But I'm becoming sympathetic to the fact that we may need to accomodate slow readers in UI design. I just wish there was a toggle to disable all of the icons in my entire operating system, with the exception of minimize, maximize, and close.
- userbinator 2y agoI've heard this sentiment phrased as "a picture is worth a thousand words, but often just one is enough."
- veltas 2y agoA good picture, unfortunately most modern apps are full of meaningless icons.
- energy123 2y agoThe problem is cognitive load. I have to deal with 20 apps or websites, each has 5-10 non-text icons. I then have to drag my mouse over each icon and wait for the preprogrammed 1000ms timer to show me what the icon is actually doing, which I'll then forget by the time I next use your app. It's too much load, it's too much irritation waiting for your stupid 1000ms timer to fire. It makes me hate your app without consciously realizing why.
- acc_297 2y agoI don’t mind an icon but I am frustrated if hovering the mouse doesn’t show a tooltip or alt-text style label It makes learning new software much slower and basically requires going to the docs or a video tutorial if the ui design isn’t exactly spot-on and perfectly intuitive which it almost never will be
- hh2222 2y agoAccessibility wise, for those people with impaired vision, a larger mouse cursor obscures the tool tip text making it unreadable.
- Timwi 2y agoThat's just a bug then. The tooltip should obviously just appear below the mouse, no matter how large it is, or it could just appear above the element instead of below.
- layer8 2y agoTooltips appear below the mouse pointer. By the way, this is an important reason to use OS mechanisms for UI features like that, which take care of such details, and not (having to) roll your own. Another standard feature of tooltips is that they remain on screen for a configurable amount of time (OS setting) and you can move the mouse during that time, should it obscure the tooltip for some reason.
- chrismorgan 2y agoI don’t know what OS you’re talking about, but that’s basically never been true on Windows. Native tooltips don’t natively try to dodge the cursor, and there’s no configuration of times and such, and not much actually even uses the original native stuff any more, nor should it. And as regards dodging the cursor, I don’t know of a single piece of software that actually queries the cursor in order to dodge it—though my dad told me years ago he’d implemented such a thing personally back somewhere around 2000. This wasn’t much of a problem in the past, because the largest cursors shipped out of the box were only two or three times as big, and not much would collide. But in I think 2019 Windows 10 gave you a colour and size selector, and it extends the range past 1–3 all the way up to 15, which I think might have been 256×256 or something, which is absolutely huge and I actually had a lot of fun deliberately doing bright orange size 15 cursor for a whole week when that feature first came out, before eventually settling on 4, which is still way bigger than people are used to, and well worth it, in my opinion, except that for size 3 and beyond, tooltips get occluded, and so I’d lose the first couple of letters of tooltips. (I like the way macOS enlarges the cursor if you shake it about, so you can find it if you lost it.) Huh, just checked the original Firefox bug from 2004, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248718, and it looks like they’ve finally fixed this after twenty years, in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712669. Still took five more years of occasional complaints, but I wonder if Windows making it so easy to get bad tooltips has pushed more software to fix their tooltip placement. Nice to see, even if it’s too late to benefit me any more. Of course, on the web you can’t do it properly with in-DOM tooltips; only with native tooltips, which are unfortunately very limited and often unsuitable for other reasons. —⁂— Now as for Linux + Wayland… ugh. The situation is still laughably bad. I use Sway, `output eDP-1 scale 1.5` and `seat seat0 xcursor_theme Adwaita 96`, and the cursor still appears at at least three different sizes, depending on the app. It used to be five. GTK is just ignoring the size thing so I can’t judge it, Qt seems to be actually positioning tooltips sanely these days, avoiding the cursor, which I don’t think it did four years ago. Good show.
- ryukoposting 2y agoI firmly agree, and I'll call out Linear for being struck with labelitis. The pieces of a good app are there, but so many things are buried behind buttons with funny symbols with obvious meaning.
- kmeisthax 2y agoIf we're going to make icons bear 100% of the semantic burden of UI design, we can at least be consistent and use Chinese characters for our icons. Billions of people know what they mean - way more than the number of people who will know what symbol you picked from whatever symbol library is chic this week. /s
- egeozcan 2y agoEvery time I'm busy with a topic, the next day it somehow ends up showing up on HN! I was creating a small drawing app for my 27-month-old son (mostly for me to draw tractors and excavators for him). At first, I only used icons, but they confused him. So, I added text labels, and surprisingly, even though he can't read, the labels helped reduce visual clutter. Suddenly, he could "learn" what each tool does and remember.
- drekipus 2y agothat's wild. I find that my.... 27-month old daughter (heh, what a coincidence) also recognises the titles of bluey episodes pretty easy.. we can be scrolling a list of bluey episodes, and she knows what they are by the words.. "what episode do you want to watch?" "curry quest!" - sure enough, that's what it's called and that's what the title is all of the pictures are some form of the characters doing something, so i find them fairly indistinguishable... I haven't tried letting her pick one without the picture, which will be the real test i guess.
- egeozcan 2y agoCool, also yeah, what a coincidence! We had the same thing with books. My wife and I really suspected that he was somewhat reading until we figured out that he memorized the shapes of the sentences, so individual words or the same sentence in a different font wouldn't be recognized. It's fascinating to witness how a human brain evolves. Also, about Bluey... The little guy has limited screen time so he can only see an episode or two per day, but I really want to keep watching even when he can't lol. I literally fell off the sofa laughing in the episode where they are trying to lick each others ice cream while the waltz music from the Nutcracker plays :)
- IshKebab 2y agoShe's definitely recognising the pictures not the words.
- h3half 2y agoWords are just little pictures with particular semantic meaning. My 33-month old definitely recognizes the word "no" in a few different fonts; that doesn't mean he can read, he just knows what the word "no" looks like
- Timwi 2y agoOn toolbars, text labels should be tooltips. And tooltips should show up without delay, so I can go through the icons at my own pace by just hovering over them. I feel that the idea that tooltips only show after a delay was a grave mistake, which has become cemented and is relentlessly perpetuated.
- zzo38computer 2y agoI agree, that text labels are usually much better than using icons. Icons are sometimes helpful too, but usually text is more helpful, I think. But, what is better than text and icons is documentation. Documentation is what makes the interface understandable, rather than icons.
- withinrafael 2y agoOn Windows 11, open the Microsoft Store app and select the Entertainment section, (confusingly) marked by a clapperboard icon. You'll notice an unfortunate design choice where the text labels disappear upon clicking, making navigation (or remembering where you are) less intuitive. I've raised this as a usability issue multiple times with the development team and they don't seem to agree or care. It drives me up the wall.
- frabcus 2y agoI suspect people's internal mind abilities impact this a lot. I have little visual memory so icons are hard for me. Others I think struggle with quickly scanning words. I think both are needed as we are varied people, and empathy for the need for both is important. Finally... The UI that drives me mad for this is the Discord server list in its left bar. You can't turn on text! It slows me down and makes it hard for me to deal with - especially as I'm slow to learn the icons of new servers. The list changes and they have no coherent design! (And no, the hover tooltip doesn't solve the problem)
- holowoodman 2y agoI'd say this also depends on the number of menu/icon bar/... entries that have to be distinguished. If there are only 5 options, like new/open/save/settings/help, plain icons are fine. If you are making a very complex application and there are 50 options, text is absolutely necessary. The alternative is me hovering over each icon and waiting for the tooltip hover text, status line help or (worst of all) using the context-help button. It also depends on how common and recognizable your icons and functions are. If you are doing new/open/save/settings/help, and the icons are resembling the usual standards everyone is used to, fine. If you either draw your own icons, or your functions are frobnicate/somnambulate/fart/discombombulate/deflagrate, then plain icons are insufficient, you need text labels as well.
- begueradj 2y agoYou don't need to translate a "delete" icon in a multilingue website.
- IshKebab 2y agoYou don't need to translate the word "Delete" either. Automatic translation can trivially deal with that. More broadly, unless your pictograms are very clear (e.g. IKEA) then it's still better to add text because then at least the information is there. I can't count the number of instruction manuals I've read where the authors have clearly thought they were IKEA and could avoid using text, only to make incomprehensible diagrams that confuse more than help. If only they had used text in any language! I don't care if it's Swahili, at least then I would be able to translate it.
- nloomans 2y agoOnly if you don't care about accessibility. You still want labels for screenreaders and other assistive technologies.
- pavlov 2y agoUI research since the 1990s has shown this to be the case. Labels provide much better recognition than icons alone. Paradoxically we now have much better display technology that allows rendering sharp and legible text in UIs, but design fashion and localization laziness dictate that most UI designers have instead been trying to eliminate all text. Even when usability guidelines exist, they are ignored because UI design has become a vibes-based profession. For example, Apple’s iOS human interface guidelines unequivocally say that tab bars should include both icons and text labels. It’s been a long time since I met a designer who has actually read these guidelines. They seem to think anything Apple publishes is some kind of checklist for engineers, and can’t be meant to inhibit their Figma freedoms.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoI like text labels because they let me Ctrl-F for the thing I'm actually looking for in a cluttered interface. I can't Ctrl-F an icon.
- levmiseri 2y agoTo add to this. UX Myth — Icons enhance usability: https://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usability https://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usabil...
- globular-toast 2y agoI'll take neither, thanks. The best user interface is a bunch of physical buttons/keys arranged in a board on my desk. A "graphical" UI seems to require similar brain engagement as, say, navigating the index of a book. Physical keys, on the other hand, engage a completely different part of the brain that is capable of "muscle memory". Ever seen someone knitting and watching TV at the same time? Or controlling a car while simultaneously watching other traffic and following road signs? It's the same thing. A keyboard allows you to express your intention to the computer without actually engaging the "thinking" part of your brain at all.
- md_rumpf 2y agoMy guess is a lot of these studies don't replicate as well in Europe vs. US. Road signs in the US are predominantly text: PED XING. ONE WAY. DO NOT PASS. Where the European equivalents are all pictograms. Europe needs to do it this way, because the countries are so small you'd expect German-speakers driving in France and vice-versa: French-only text signs would be criminal. Similarly, a French-speaker can navigate a German train station without understanding German writing. Europeans are actually much more attuned to deriving meaning from pictograms than their American counterparts.
- fsh 2y agoAs a European, I cannot make any sense of the low-contrast pictograms in "modern" software (VS Code, Obsidian, etc.).
- greenmartian 2y agoIronically, Visual Studio introduced monochrome icons in the early 2010s, and the protestations were so deafening that they introduced colours back in. Fast-forward a decade, and nobody even bats an eye. I also struggle visually navigating around VSCode when I'm not using a keyboard, but we seem to be a minority.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoFrench people don't do anything radically different on French roads and train stations than they do on German ones (and vice-versa for any pair of nationalities), but what one does in one app might be very different to another.
- kbrannigan 2y agoWhat if the writings were English only would that be a sin? I think English speakers have this innate expectation for the world adapt to them. They Speak their native language and expect signage, menus, conversations, to be in English. But if a person attempts to only speaks their own non-english native language, that's being rude.
- 2y ago
- moffkalast 2y agoOn smartphones it makes sense to have just icons, since screen real estate is extremely limited. But there's no reason not to have both icons and text on desktop/tablets. I don't get what people see in GNOME and W10+ style taskbars with grouped icons where you can't tell shit about fuck about what's actually open. Labelled non-grouped tabs reduce the amount of steps and clicks needed to switch and it's not like we're running out of screen space to display them on 16:9 monitors.
- andybak 2y agoI wonder how many people with strong opinions commenting here have read any of the classic books and blog posts on this topic? There seems to be a lot rehashing of debates that I always regarded as mostly settled.
- macintux 2y agoEvery discussion here is mostly by people who haven’t read the literature, but that’s true of any online forum.
- codr7 2y agoBig issue in mobile apps from my experience, guessing which blob of pixels means what gets old fast. Even the icons aren't very good most of the time, seemingly aiming for anything but simplifying use. They do make a nice square target to tap compared to text, but the same effect could be achieved by using the first letter capitalized as icon or something similar. I sometimes dream of Lisp machine/SmallTalk like mobile interfaces, is there anything going on in that area?
- jll29 2y agoIt's neither about icons nor strictly speaking "text" labels, but I'm bothered by the spread of menus titled "+" or "..."; they are a new thing, and they make stuff harder to find. In the 1990s, "..." was reserved as part of text labels, and it had a clear meaning: "save" without "..." saved a file immediately, whereas "save as..." with the three dots indicated there was another dialog coming once clicked (to determine the file name). The new uses of "..." (alone) don't mean much, as far as I can see.
- cassepipe 2y agoOne of the griped I had about Firefox latest UI design was actually that they removed text labels from their menu, among others Using this now, this embraces the new design but fixes poor UI decisions. It even has a one liner install/update script !: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
- WalterBright 2y agoI've been saying this since the Mac was introduced! There's a reason why every pictographic language evolved into a phonetic language. > a trash can icon reliably communicates “delete,” Only because Jobs popularized it. Manny iphone apps use "delete". The trouble with pictures is they can indicate objects (though not very reliably), they cannot indicate verbs reliably at all.
- singpolyma3 2y agoIf you don't know what a button does, tap it and find out.
- AlienRobot 2y agoThis is the correct opinion have. The text "Del" conveys the same meaning as a trash can and uses less space. >The more icons we have to scan over, the more brain power we put toward making sense of them rather than using the tools they represent While we're talking about brains, it's my personal theory that the monochrome icons like those in the screenshots are the bane of all GUI design. Humans were born with the ability to see all colors (that humans can see). Limiting icons to a single color effectively restricts the ability of the icon to convey visual information. If each icon was a distinctive color, we wouldn't even need to look at their shape.
- card_zero 2y agoI just updated my Vivaldi browser, and here is the new icon for "home page": https://ibb.co/0RXBmf46 https://ibb.co/0RXBmf46 It's a flabby pentagon with slightly rounded corners and a short horizontal line in the lower middle. I guess the old familiar house shape wasn't modern enough? So is this what modern houses look like, wider at the top than the bottom? The line, presumably, represents a door, in a stylish, minimal, modern way.
- oliviergg 2y agoAs a developer, I’m so used to fuzzy search command (ctrl+P) that I would like to see this in every complex application. Just some important icon with label the rest in the search bar.
- eirikbakke 2y agoThis problem was traditionally solved with menu bars (File, Edit, View etc.). Every action in the app would be listed somewhere in the menu, spelled out in text and with the icon and keyboard shortcut listed next to it if available. That user interface tradition was eventually lost, first with ribbons, and then with web apps.
- int_19h 2y agoThis is one thing that I've grown to appreciate about macOS screen-top menu bars. Even though I dislike them conceptually on the basis that there shouldn't be a disconnect between the menu and the thing that it operates on, the fact that every app is forced to have a menu bar means that UX designers have to, at least, spend some time thinking on what to put in there, so that it doesn't look silly completely empty except for the system menu.
- astrostl 2y agoOur latest home has a confusing array of light switches. I picked up a Brother P-touch CUBE label maker (apparently a hit among all sorts of hobbies), and ended up deciding that the best way to go was text labels + color coding to indicate zones/functions (e.g., hot pink for garbage disposals). Works fantastic.