4 ms·

Could we kill the icon?

25 points by vxNsr 13y ago

julespitt 13y ago
Once a symbol has a meaning, it works, and continues to work as long as people know its meaning. This article is akin to complaining that the letters of the alphabet or the spelling of words don't represent their sound or meaning well. True, but what is there to do about it? There is no need to cleanse the world of symbols away because the metaphor no longer holds. And no, young people have absolutely no problem figuring out what the symbols are for - they just don't know why. Oh well.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Exactly; having symbols that are stable and which everyone understands is very helpful. Everybody knows that the "floppy disk" icon means "save". What would we replace it with? An image of one of the many common shapes of an SD card? And what if next year a different form of storage becomes common? Do we change all the UIs? Not to mention that it's nice to have UIs that carry over from one device to another, so that you don't have to switch to a whole new set of symbols when you go from your laptop to your phone.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Everybody who has experience with a computer that is. There are many more people on Earth that were not exposed to the current paradigms of UI and they would benefit from sane symbols.
    - Gormo 13y ago
      Also, they should be spared the burden of having to learn existing natural languages, with all of their multiple strata of evolutionary development. Instead, new spoken languages should be devised from scratch every generation or two, to prevent people from being contaminated by exposure to historical context.
- jared314 13y ago
  This reminds me of a scene from The Diamond Age where a child read animated characters instead of static letters and words. While you could switch to the old style, the animated ones were easier to distinguish, and so preferred by him.
  - lcedp 13y ago
    "Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger pictures in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets." Animated icons it is. There is also a mention of these symbols in Anathem. I haven't got an impression that author sees them as a higher form of communication, rather they are a more "secular" form. Btw, I have under 200 program icons in the launcher of my phone, they are arranged (or better word disarranged) in a grid by alphabet or installation time, some are in folders. I know the position of frequently used ones but for rare used ones nothing is better then good old search by letters.
drakaal 13y ago
Sure we can kill the Icon. I am building voice interfaces. Eyes Off interfaces have no need for icons.
dennis_vartan 13y ago
What about thinking of icons as visual anchors -- something to quickly "catch" your eye as you're looking for an operation? What if it doesn't matter what picture the icon has, as long as the shape is clearly recognizable? Important to distinguish two types of users here: (a) Someone unfamiliar with a UI will need more visual cues, textual hints, and so on. "What does this button/icon do?" Without helpful text, they may be stuck. (b) But, someone who has used a particular piece of UI hundreds of times will simply zero in on an app by its icon's shape/color/position. In this case, it's much better to have many varying icons rather than pretty but similar-looking circles. And in this case, it doesn't actually matter what the icons portray. The iOS 7 Safari icon, while unsightly, catches my eye every darn time. Is that its purpose? And, again, in iOS 7, is this why the gradients follow opposite directions? Would love if anyone could point to more "science" in this, as I'm simply speaking from my observations.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  I was about to say the same thing with the same background (none) If I need to open Gmail, I'm not just looking for the word "Gmail" in a list, I'm using a much more complex search algorithm. I'm looking for: - the distinctive red/gray lines - a rectangle - the word "gmail" - words that start with f, or start with h - a specific region of my screen, that I remember last housing this icon
- mmagin 13y ago
  Continuing with "b", I think there's some benefit to having both distinct shapes and distinct colors (which often gets thrown out in modern design on high resolution, high color-depth displays -- you can have any color you want in the UI so long as it is blue, silver, or white!) Anecdotally, I think there are some people who distinguish shapes more quickly and others who distinguish colors more quickly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
krapp 13y ago
Abandoning a perfectly valid, simple graphical language and replacing everything with gestures and three-dimensional interfaces is not a step forward in my opinion. Don't think of it as a "floppy disk" icon, think of it as what it is - a word in another language, one which happens to translate to "save" in English. You might as well get rid of the letters on keyboards because umpteen thousand years ago they were pictographs for objects or concepts which are no longer relevant to modern young people.
wvenable 13y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines continues here, the answer is no. You can't kill the icon. Or at least this article makes no mention of any alternative or possibility of how that might be done.
bryne 13y ago
Could I kill that icon in cornflower blue? This misses the point in favor of some misguided idealism, I think. It's hard enough to cram a functional, usable interface into the space provided often enough without worrying about throwing a hard-won language of visual metaphors straight into the trash before you start.
- gohrt 13y ago
  > into the trash "skeuomorph!"
Rumudiez 13y ago
These are the kinds of thoughts I could only expect from someone who only encounters bad semiotic practice. Rather than "killing the icon," he should be focused on educating people about the main categorizations of signs and enforcing icon designers to make good use of indexical and iconic signs, rather than coming up with unrelated symbols that users have to learn through trial and error or type-based assistance.
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
The problem is skeuomorphism was and is a lazy way to provide contextual cues. It is merely one tool amongst a set of tools for providing non-explicit information to the user.
- wvenable 13y ago
  Lazy is good for users. But all lot of the skeuomorphism that is rallied against is the kind that is merely decoration. There's a lot of babies being thrown out with bathwater lately.
carsongross 13y ago
This is a great example of how 2D UX design is going completely off the rails. FlatUI is making it impossible to distinguish between buttons, tags, labels and tabs. Skeuomorphism, correctly derided in its cartoonish, Mac Calendar form, has come to mean having any depth in a UI. Sane-looking buttons? Skeuomorphic! Using an inset for an aside? Skeuomorphic! Icons? Skeuomorphic! Mouse pointer? Skeuomorphic! It reminds me of the way the the Bauhaus guys would yell "Bourgeois!" at one another's designs until all they were left with were unlivable, white cubes: http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html
- Tloewald 13y ago
  We'll see. In the short run, most good design tends to overshoot a bit (remember the first iteration of Aqua?). I suspect we'll see some affordances come back -- on the whole iOS7 is mostly a step in a good direction (e.g. the indicator of an interactive widget vs. content in iOS7 is, pretty consistently, color -- I think it works well and eliminates a lot of cruft). The idea of banishing icons is, however, kind of nutty. Icons serve both a practical and aesthetic role, and switching to fluid layers of words is going to both be aesthetically limiting and confusing.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    No, what is aqua? As a non-designer who keeps an eye on design trends, I've honestly never heard of it.
    - alphakappa 13y ago
      OP is talking about what the OS X UI looked like in the early days [1] 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
- Fice 13y ago
  In my understanding, buttons and tabs are skeuomorphs, no matter if they are rendered flat or pseudo-3D. In a true digital UI (e. g. CLI shell) there are no such things. I am not trying to say that we should get rid of buttons everywhere, my point is that making UI flat is not enough to make it non-skeuomorphic: it may be flat but still based on imitating real-world objects (now doing it badly).
Zoepfli 13y ago
I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the brain, and the best way is to use them together, e.g. have an icon plus some text right next to it. Some people are image oriented, and can go by the icons. Some people are text oriented and can just read the text. The text helps first timers who might not yet be aware of certain icon conventions. The icons help power users because icons with clear silhouettes can be read very fast. And yet another group of people read the text and look at the icon every time - even during repeated use. Because there are several parts of the brain that recognize a command, they feel more assured that what they are about to click is the right thing, and therefore feel more comfortable with the GUI. All of this is nothing new, really. It goes back to the very first GUIs. There is 30 years of experience with this, there are probably lots of studies that this is indeed a good way to go. So no, we should not kill the icon.
- Gormo 13y ago
  > I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the brain It doesn't "feel" like that to me, as far as my own metaperception goes. At least not at a purely semantic level: I see a word, and I associate it with a concept; I see an icon, and I associate it with a concept. There's rarely any syntactic relationship among icons as there is among words, so icons are equivalent to merely seeing an single word in isolation, labelling something.
jamesaguilar 13y ago
Probably, but we wouldn't want to.
DrJokepu 13y ago
Meh. The very letters he is using to communicate his ideas are descendants of icons. The capital A is derived from Aleph, the ancient Semitic symbol of an ox. It used to look like the head of an ox, sort of. In fact, "A" still kind of looks like an upside down ox head, with the horns and everything. It does no longer mean an ox, it means letter A. Because the that’s the first sound in the word "Aleph". Similarly these icons have evolved to have abstract meanings beyond their original ones.
sovande 13y ago
Going from theory to practice, getting rid of the wall of icons on the iOS home screen would certainly be nice. But replacing it with what? Siri and spotlight maybe?
blogtarded 13y ago
This is a dumb article and a not-so-subtle advertisement for svbtle.com , yet another shitty blog hole by yet another "startup" "co-creater".
bcoates 13y ago
In 30+ years on this planet, I have never lived in anything that resembles the shotgun shack that is the "Home" icon. (To me, the canonical home is either a ranch or a brownstone, which look nothing like that) I think the kids will be OK with a 3.5" disk icon without caring what it represents.
indubitably 13y ago
I guess the post is a rant, because the author doesn't actually say what is supposed to replace the icon.
DDR0 13y ago
What in the world are we suppose to replace it _with_, though?
badave 13y ago
The answer is just a flat and obvious, "No". Firstly, symbols have been around for thousands of years. Our written language is built around them, and our everyday life is surrounded by them. These aren't going anywhere and are a required abstraction for higher thought. These aren't going away. Second, logos are prettier symbols, but they are pervasive in our world. Every single business has a logo and tries to push that logo and brand at you every chance they get. These aren't going away. Third, icons are logos and/or symbols. It stands to reason that if the previous two aren't going anywhere, then icons aren't going anywhere. Until we have telepathy, that is.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.
- krapp 13y ago
  GUIs did a formidable job of killing CLIs...
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest. CLIs (and textual environments generally) also use icons that have long been divorced from the real-world things they originally represented. And in ways which have nothing to do with their original iconic uses, anyhow. I'm not sure how that's better than just using icons.
mmagin 13y ago
What is all this "native" digital medium that he mentions three times in this post? While a lot of metaphors to old ways of doing things (office work, etc.) may be clumsy, the "native" interface to the computer is really far too low-level for everyday use.
- krapp 13y ago
  That part was confusing. I suspect though it more or less refers to the crux of whatever point he's trying to make, so maybe he needs to run it through a couple more drafts and clarify. Sounds like voodoo to me. He talks about having users provide their own gestural icons... which just seems like it would be a pain to have to come up with a new kind of flourish every time you installed an app, and I supposed speech recognition, which like gestural commands has a place but I don't think necessarily surpasses the utility of "the little orange and blue round thingy makes firefox happen". I mean that's just perfect.
adammil 13y ago
Icon consistency is far more important than flat/skewmorphic artistic concerns. For example, my kid has never seen a 3.5" disk, but knows the icon means "Save", probably because it is consistent among the UIs he uses. Even if you find the best icon metaphor for Settings, changing the gear icon to something else will cause pain for lots of people mainly because it is new, more than any other artistic consideration.
gbl08ma 13y ago
Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says: "That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is." I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural. Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past". "Imagine a native digital medium" In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract. And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before-seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.
melloclello 13y ago
Icons are hieroglyphs, and there's nothing wrong with that
DanBC 13y ago
Everyone on HN can use a computer and has been using computers for years. Obviously it doesn't matter to you what the icons are - you'll learn them and use them. Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often, or who hasn't used this particular piece of software before. What works for those people? I'll agree that the article doesn't make any sense for those people either.
- Gormo 13y ago
  > Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often Actually, let's not. There's no justification for hobbling utility of computers for those who do use them in order to make them putatively more understandable to those who do not. Of course, your point still stands: the established conventions - common icons, CLIs, WIMP interfaces, etc. - are the language that's evolved among those who do use computers, and attempting to replace it with something cut from whole cloth makes computing less accessible to everyone.
Kluny 13y ago
Typical useless Svtle post. You outline the problem (and it's a real one), get my attention, pique my interest, and then just stop before you add the slightest bit of useful information. Was it too much to come up with even one useful idea about how to solve the problem?
- guynamedloren 13y ago
  I got to the end and thought I skipped over something accidentally. Read the article for a second time to confirm that there is not even a hint as to how to solve the problem...
  - eulerphi 13y ago
    There is no problem. The "problem"/argument mentioned is manufactured out of pure bullishness toward the current stay of things.
miguelrochefort 13y ago
After reading the comments here, it's easy to feel like a visionary genius. I mean, don't you guys see how obvious this is? The UI/workflow of the future is nothing like the crap we use today. I'm quite confused by people's ignorance. Seriously.
itchitawa 13y ago
Maybe oneday the save icon will go because applications will maintain their state automatically and the whole concept of working on an "open" copy of a file which is different from the "saved" one will disappear. Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon.
- krapp 13y ago
  > Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon. And many don't, thus it's still useful.
- wvenable 13y ago
  > Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Ultimately because people prefer the control that it gives them. They can edit a document and just decide they don't want to save their changes and they can do that. Or they can save it under a different name or in a different folder.
msutherl 13y ago
The replacement of icons with text in iOS7 was wrong-headed and inconsistently executed. Not to mention that it created a bunch of messes for designers to deal with. I hope that we return to a world where icons are fashionable again soon.
null_ptr 13y ago
Yes, please, make your interfaces as unusable as you possibly can. Get on that trend bandwagon and never let go, let it take you far, far away.
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
Here's the reality. These flat stuff is a fad. Hating skein program is essentially a snobbish sort of fad that that has been thrust upon users whether they like or not.

25 points by vxNsr 13y ago

Once a symbol has a meaning, it works, and continues to work as long as people know its meaning. This article is akin to complaining that the letters of the alphabet or the spelling of words don't represent their sound or meaning well. True, but what is there to do about it? There is no need to cleanse the world of symbols away because the metaphor no longer holds. And no, young people have absolutely no problem figuring out what the symbols are for - they just don't know why. Oh well.

greenyoda 13y ago
Exactly; having symbols that are stable and which everyone understands is very helpful. Everybody knows that the "floppy disk" icon means "save". What would we replace it with? An image of one of the many common shapes of an SD card? And what if next year a different form of storage becomes common? Do we change all the UIs? Not to mention that it's nice to have UIs that carry over from one device to another, so that you don't have to switch to a whole new set of symbols when you go from your laptop to your phone.
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  Everybody who has experience with a computer that is. There are many more people on Earth that were not exposed to the current paradigms of UI and they would benefit from sane symbols.
  - Gormo 13y ago
    Also, they should be spared the burden of having to learn existing natural languages, with all of their multiple strata of evolutionary development. Instead, new spoken languages should be devised from scratch every generation or two, to prevent people from being contaminated by exposure to historical context.
jared314 13y ago
This reminds me of a scene from The Diamond Age where a child read animated characters instead of static letters and words. While you could switch to the old style, the animated ones were easier to distinguish, and so preferred by him.
- lcedp 13y ago
  "Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger pictures in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets." Animated icons it is. There is also a mention of these symbols in Anathem. I haven't got an impression that author sees them as a higher form of communication, rather they are a more "secular" form. Btw, I have under 200 program icons in the launcher of my phone, they are arranged (or better word disarranged) in a grid by alphabet or installation time, some are in folders. I know the position of frequently used ones but for rare used ones nothing is better then good old search by letters.

drakaal 13y ago

Sure we can kill the Icon. I am building voice interfaces. Eyes Off interfaces have no need for icons.

dennis_vartan 13y ago

What about thinking of icons as visual anchors -- something to quickly "catch" your eye as you're looking for an operation? What if it doesn't matter what picture the icon has, as long as the shape is clearly recognizable? Important to distinguish two types of users here: (a) Someone unfamiliar with a UI will need more visual cues, textual hints, and so on. "What does this button/icon do?" Without helpful text, they may be stuck. (b) But, someone who has used a particular piece of UI hundreds of times will simply zero in on an app by its icon's shape/color/position. In this case, it's much better to have many varying icons rather than pretty but similar-looking circles. And in this case, it doesn't actually matter what the icons portray. The iOS 7 Safari icon, while unsightly, catches my eye every darn time. Is that its purpose? And, again, in iOS 7, is this why the gradients follow opposite directions? Would love if anyone could point to more "science" in this, as I'm simply speaking from my observations.

hayksaakian 13y ago
I was about to say the same thing with the same background (none) If I need to open Gmail, I'm not just looking for the word "Gmail" in a list, I'm using a much more complex search algorithm. I'm looking for: - the distinctive red/gray lines - a rectangle - the word "gmail" - words that start with f, or start with h - a specific region of my screen, that I remember last housing this icon
mmagin 13y ago
Continuing with "b", I think there's some benefit to having both distinct shapes and distinct colors (which often gets thrown out in modern design on high resolution, high color-depth displays -- you can have any color you want in the UI so long as it is blue, silver, or white!) Anecdotally, I think there are some people who distinguish shapes more quickly and others who distinguish colors more quickly.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

krapp 13y ago

Abandoning a perfectly valid, simple graphical language and replacing everything with gestures and three-dimensional interfaces is not a step forward in my opinion. Don't think of it as a "floppy disk" icon, think of it as what it is - a word in another language, one which happens to translate to "save" in English. You might as well get rid of the letters on keyboards because umpteen thousand years ago they were pictographs for objects or concepts which are no longer relevant to modern young people.

wvenable 13y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines continues here, the answer is no. You can't kill the icon. Or at least this article makes no mention of any alternative or possibility of how that might be done.

bryne 13y ago

Could I kill that icon in cornflower blue? This misses the point in favor of some misguided idealism, I think. It's hard enough to cram a functional, usable interface into the space provided often enough without worrying about throwing a hard-won language of visual metaphors straight into the trash before you start.

gohrt 13y ago
> into the trash "skeuomorph!"

Rumudiez 13y ago

These are the kinds of thoughts I could only expect from someone who only encounters bad semiotic practice. Rather than "killing the icon," he should be focused on educating people about the main categorizations of signs and enforcing icon designers to make good use of indexical and iconic signs, rather than coming up with unrelated symbols that users have to learn through trial and error or type-based assistance.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

The problem is skeuomorphism was and is a lazy way to provide contextual cues. It is merely one tool amongst a set of tools for providing non-explicit information to the user.

wvenable 13y ago
Lazy is good for users. But all lot of the skeuomorphism that is rallied against is the kind that is merely decoration. There's a lot of babies being thrown out with bathwater lately.

carsongross 13y ago

This is a great example of how 2D UX design is going completely off the rails. FlatUI is making it impossible to distinguish between buttons, tags, labels and tabs. Skeuomorphism, correctly derided in its cartoonish, Mac Calendar form, has come to mean having any depth in a UI. Sane-looking buttons? Skeuomorphic! Using an inset for an aside? Skeuomorphic! Icons? Skeuomorphic! Mouse pointer? Skeuomorphic! It reminds me of the way the the Bauhaus guys would yell "Bourgeois!" at one another's designs until all they were left with were unlivable, white cubes: http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html

Tloewald 13y ago
We'll see. In the short run, most good design tends to overshoot a bit (remember the first iteration of Aqua?). I suspect we'll see some affordances come back -- on the whole iOS7 is mostly a step in a good direction (e.g. the indicator of an interactive widget vs. content in iOS7 is, pretty consistently, color -- I think it works well and eliminates a lot of cruft). The idea of banishing icons is, however, kind of nutty. Icons serve both a practical and aesthetic role, and switching to fluid layers of words is going to both be aesthetically limiting and confusing.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  No, what is aqua? As a non-designer who keeps an eye on design trends, I've honestly never heard of it.
  - alphakappa 13y ago
    OP is talking about what the OS X UI looked like in the early days [1] 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
Fice 13y ago
In my understanding, buttons and tabs are skeuomorphs, no matter if they are rendered flat or pseudo-3D. In a true digital UI (e. g. CLI shell) there are no such things. I am not trying to say that we should get rid of buttons everywhere, my point is that making UI flat is not enough to make it non-skeuomorphic: it may be flat but still based on imitating real-world objects (now doing it badly).

Zoepfli 13y ago

I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the brain, and the best way is to use them together, e.g. have an icon plus some text right next to it. Some people are image oriented, and can go by the icons. Some people are text oriented and can just read the text. The text helps first timers who might not yet be aware of certain icon conventions. The icons help power users because icons with clear silhouettes can be read very fast. And yet another group of people read the text and look at the icon every time - even during repeated use. Because there are several parts of the brain that recognize a command, they feel more assured that what they are about to click is the right thing, and therefore feel more comfortable with the GUI. All of this is nothing new, really. It goes back to the very first GUIs. There is 30 years of experience with this, there are probably lots of studies that this is indeed a good way to go. So no, we should not kill the icon.

Gormo 13y ago
> I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the brain It doesn't "feel" like that to me, as far as my own metaperception goes. At least not at a purely semantic level: I see a word, and I associate it with a concept; I see an icon, and I associate it with a concept. There's rarely any syntactic relationship among icons as there is among words, so icons are equivalent to merely seeing an single word in isolation, labelling something.

jamesaguilar 13y ago

Probably, but we wouldn't want to.

DrJokepu 13y ago

Meh. The very letters he is using to communicate his ideas are descendants of icons. The capital A is derived from Aleph, the ancient Semitic symbol of an ox. It used to look like the head of an ox, sort of. In fact, "A" still kind of looks like an upside down ox head, with the horns and everything. It does no longer mean an ox, it means letter A. Because the that’s the first sound in the word "Aleph". Similarly these icons have evolved to have abstract meanings beyond their original ones.

sovande 13y ago

Going from theory to practice, getting rid of the wall of icons on the iOS home screen would certainly be nice. But replacing it with what? Siri and spotlight maybe?

blogtarded 13y ago

This is a dumb article and a not-so-subtle advertisement for svbtle.com , yet another shitty blog hole by yet another "startup" "co-creater".

bcoates 13y ago

In 30+ years on this planet, I have never lived in anything that resembles the shotgun shack that is the "Home" icon. (To me, the canonical home is either a ranch or a brownstone, which look nothing like that) I think the kids will be OK with a 3.5" disk icon without caring what it represents.

indubitably 13y ago

I guess the post is a rant, because the author doesn't actually say what is supposed to replace the icon.

DDR0 13y ago

What in the world are we suppose to replace it _with_, though?

badave 13y ago

The answer is just a flat and obvious, "No". Firstly, symbols have been around for thousands of years. Our written language is built around them, and our everyday life is surrounded by them. These aren't going anywhere and are a required abstraction for higher thought. These aren't going away. Second, logos are prettier symbols, but they are pervasive in our world. Every single business has a logo and tries to push that logo and brand at you every chance they get. These aren't going away. Third, icons are logos and/or symbols. It stands to reason that if the previous two aren't going anywhere, then icons aren't going anywhere. Until we have telepathy, that is.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.

krapp 13y ago
GUIs did a formidable job of killing CLIs...
dragonwriter 13y ago
> CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest. CLIs (and textual environments generally) also use icons that have long been divorced from the real-world things they originally represented. And in ways which have nothing to do with their original iconic uses, anyhow. I'm not sure how that's better than just using icons.

mmagin 13y ago

What is all this "native" digital medium that he mentions three times in this post? While a lot of metaphors to old ways of doing things (office work, etc.) may be clumsy, the "native" interface to the computer is really far too low-level for everyday use.

krapp 13y ago
That part was confusing. I suspect though it more or less refers to the crux of whatever point he's trying to make, so maybe he needs to run it through a couple more drafts and clarify. Sounds like voodoo to me. He talks about having users provide their own gestural icons... which just seems like it would be a pain to have to come up with a new kind of flourish every time you installed an app, and I supposed speech recognition, which like gestural commands has a place but I don't think necessarily surpasses the utility of "the little orange and blue round thingy makes firefox happen". I mean that's just perfect.

adammil 13y ago

Icon consistency is far more important than flat/skewmorphic artistic concerns. For example, my kid has never seen a 3.5" disk, but knows the icon means "Save", probably because it is consistent among the UIs he uses. Even if you find the best icon metaphor for Settings, changing the gear icon to something else will cause pain for lots of people mainly because it is new, more than any other artistic consideration.

gbl08ma 13y ago

Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says: "That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is." I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural. Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past". "Imagine a native digital medium" In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract. And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before-seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.

melloclello 13y ago

Icons are hieroglyphs, and there's nothing wrong with that

DanBC 13y ago

Everyone on HN can use a computer and has been using computers for years. Obviously it doesn't matter to you what the icons are - you'll learn them and use them. Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often, or who hasn't used this particular piece of software before. What works for those people? I'll agree that the article doesn't make any sense for those people either.

Gormo 13y ago
> Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often Actually, let's not. There's no justification for hobbling utility of computers for those who do use them in order to make them putatively more understandable to those who do not. Of course, your point still stands: the established conventions - common icons, CLIs, WIMP interfaces, etc. - are the language that's evolved among those who do use computers, and attempting to replace it with something cut from whole cloth makes computing less accessible to everyone.

Kluny 13y ago

Typical useless Svtle post. You outline the problem (and it's a real one), get my attention, pique my interest, and then just stop before you add the slightest bit of useful information. Was it too much to come up with even one useful idea about how to solve the problem?

guynamedloren 13y ago
I got to the end and thought I skipped over something accidentally. Read the article for a second time to confirm that there is not even a hint as to how to solve the problem...
- eulerphi 13y ago
  There is no problem. The "problem"/argument mentioned is manufactured out of pure bullishness toward the current stay of things.

miguelrochefort 13y ago

After reading the comments here, it's easy to feel like a visionary genius. I mean, don't you guys see how obvious this is? The UI/workflow of the future is nothing like the crap we use today. I'm quite confused by people's ignorance. Seriously.

itchitawa 13y ago

Maybe oneday the save icon will go because applications will maintain their state automatically and the whole concept of working on an "open" copy of a file which is different from the "saved" one will disappear. Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon.

krapp 13y ago
> Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon. And many don't, thus it's still useful.
wvenable 13y ago
> Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Ultimately because people prefer the control that it gives them. They can edit a document and just decide they don't want to save their changes and they can do that. Or they can save it under a different name or in a different folder.

msutherl 13y ago

The replacement of icons with text in iOS7 was wrong-headed and inconsistently executed. Not to mention that it created a bunch of messes for designers to deal with. I hope that we return to a world where icons are fashionable again soon.

null_ptr 13y ago

Yes, please, make your interfaces as unusable as you possibly can. Get on that trend bandwagon and never let go, let it take you far, far away.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

Here's the reality. These flat stuff is a fad. Hating skein program is essentially a snobbish sort of fad that that has been thrust upon users whether they like or not.