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Good UI and UX isn't about which icons to use etc, it's about making the user's journey through an app match how they're thinking about the problem. In my team
by JR1427 1y ago
Good UI and UX isn't about which icons to use etc, it's about making the user's journey through an app match how they're thinking about the problem.
In my team we spend so much time picking icons, and checking that we are matching the design patterns of other apps (yawn...), that we have just ended up with a UX that doesn't prioritise the number one reason people use our app.
- rambambram 1y agoThis. And I'd like to add: sometimes the best icons are these little characters called the alphabet. Combined they're very powerful and are called 'words'.
- XorNot 1y agoThis was how I did my car PC decades ago. Just big buttons with words on them. Words become symbols and do at a glance you could still easily tell what everything is even if you wouldn't actually read it when using it.
- pona-a 1y agoAnd then they became featureless monochrome blobs because that's the new trend, and now words are again needed to tell what each is supposed to mean.
- blueflow 1y agoCharacters are also easier to learn than emojis and iconographs because there are less of them.
- powvans 1y agoThere are thousands of Chinese characters and thousands of Kanji. Maybe we are destined to replace all existing written language with 10’s of thousands of emoji? I’ll be illiterate in that world, but my kids seem to grok it.
- skydhash 1y agoAFAIK, Chinese characters are words, not a more basic unit. The thing with emoji is that there’s no easy way to use them without typing their associated terms.
- dylan604 1y agoWouldn't this be closer to hieroglyphics?
- raincole 1y agoChinese characters can be used as a writing system because they're actually highly abstract. They don't look like what their ancestors were supposed to represent. That's a feature, not a bug. The issue with emoji is that they're very literal.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoThe irony is that I think 囧 is the only emoji that is allowed on HN. Seriously, though, there are plenty of very old out of use characters that can be used as emoji, and modern use of Chinese characters in new words is increasingly phonetic.
- dnpls 1y agoSo you believe it's easier to learn which combination of letters in the context of a given interface means "home" or "chat" than an icon? You don't understand how the human brain works, it's much quicker to discern an icon as you glance at a screen then find a word and get your brain to interpret their meaning. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, an enormous amount of dictionary words, but it very unusual to have a single screen containing more than 10 different icons.
- blueflow 1y agoTo understand icons, they must resemble something you have seen before. If you were born in 2005, you won't know what the button with the floppy disk on it does because you have never seen or used a floppy. Or a cloud to mean "upload", or a thin moon crescent to mean "sleep". These are things that don't derive from the real world (any more) and must be explicitly communicated.
- __m 1y agowords are good to understand the meaning of the icons if they are more abstract, but once you know the meaning it's easier to scan a list of icons than a list of words
- EasyMark 1y agoBoth are good. Do both
- OskarS 1y agoI was just having a discussion with our customer support manager for an coming update to our software. He made this point, ”I really like it when buttons have names. Then I can tell the customers ’click the EXPORT button’ instead of ’click the little button that kinda looks like a square with an arrow pointing out of it’”. It really is a very good point.
- nosioptar 1y agoEarlier today I attempted to use an android app I wasn't familiar with. I uninstalled it after the 57th time I had to ask myself, "what in the everliving donkey fuck is that icon supposed to be"? That's what I get for installing an app that describes itself as "beautiful".
- Lammy 1y agoOn Android you can long-press a confusing icon-only button to get a Toast with a textual description.
- zppln 1y agoIcon selection definitely plays a part. Flat, monochrome icons are just garbage. A particularly bad example is editing a page in Confluence where you know there should be a button for e.g. fill color but you can't find it because every single icon looks the same.