Looking back through time for all the horrible UI sins cataloged in the opening paragraph, I'm pretty sure all of those were much more common in the past than they are now. Somehow, we actually have made those pieces of progress.
Except for cryptic icons, those seem on the rise again.
I feel like things have consistently gotten worse from a UI perspective since Windows2000. Every aspect of the interface including the icons are harder to understand. It's hard to describe, but them seem to lack context.
I get what the point is (i think). Symbols like we see that indicate male vs female gendered bathrooms, the 'Handicap parking' and others allow everybody (and i hope all/most cultures) to instantly recognize what is being depicted. I would be hard pressed to guess what half of these are trying to represent.
Maybe it's unrelated, but I have a real beef with modern flat UI design and icons.
For worst examples, look up the modern Microsoft production, such as VS 2012 or Lync 2013. Is the future really that ugly?
These just seems to me, compared to old, nice colorful icons, as drawings of 6-year olds. I can't shave off the feeling that they are just cheap. Or maybe it's the consequence of de-skilling the article is writing about?
And yet, people do grow up knowing that the green banana button means "phone" and the notched rectangle means "save", and often never even question "is there a real world analog for this icon?". It isn't that icons are obsolete: it is that we are graduating from a language of pictograms to a language of ideograms, yet for some reason we have large numbers of people telling us that that is somehow a horrible thing to do.
This era ~15 years ago must have been peak GUI design, with many applications being both beginner-friendly and powerful. And if your grandma called, you could easily steer her through menus over the phone. Nowadays, good luck describing the latest incarnation of the hamburger icon over the phone, especially when all the other monochrome line drawings look quite similar to aging eyes.
Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse. I don't think old MS ones look nice but they are instantly recognizable (and really, most stuff from those times.
Nowadays we're getting weird trend to either monochromatize or outright abstract icons that can't be easily associated with a thing. When we had 256 colors and tiny amount of pixels developers used every single one of them, now we have millions and get colorful squares
This article would have been interesting if included actual suggestions for replacement icons.
Being anachronistic isn't inherently a flaw. However, if our attachment to anachronism is preventing us from using more intuitive icons, then our bias toward anachronism is something we should examine critically.
So, the real question is: are there more intuitive visual representations available for common computer actions? What does an e-mail address book look like?
We haven't abandoned all of the old icons yet, though: a disk for save, an envelope for email, etc. And I think you're underestimating how much physical 'buttons' are still a part of everyday life: you might well be typing on what is essentially a huge array of buttons, after all.
Guidelines from 30 years ago dont necessarily get to remain guidelines. Cos stuff changes. We've been using guis for 20 or 30 years now. We dont need to pretend they have shadows or include a realistic depiction of some related artifact in the icon. People just get it now without all that clutter.
I'm of the opinion that there was a time, very early and ever-so-briefly, when icons were useful in distinguishing on thing from another. But now we have so many of them, all demanding our attention, and looking quite similar to one another. App icons on macOS maybe not so much, but for sure toolbar icons. IIRC, there are even usability studies out there that back me up on this, though I'm too lazy and apathetic on the topic to go look them up.
Point being, useless as icons might be these days, "we've always done it this way" and either no one dare go against the grain or no one has a better idea.
The article misses the mark IMHO by focusing on skeuomorphic(sp?) icons.
Yes, usability has degraded during the recent 'flat design' craze, but not so much because skeuomorphism was tossed out, but because the many little visual design changes that kill discoverability.
The mobile operating systems started this trend where a lot of advanced functionality was hidden behind 'magic' touch and swipe gestures that go way beyond the simple and intuitive tap, zoom and rotate gestures, like 2-, 3- and 4-finger swipes, long and short touches, etc..., important features cannot be visually discovered (how do I close an application again, on iOS, Android and Windows8? how do I flip between applications? how do I take a screenshot?).
It's the many small things that kill usability for the sake of visual design:
- the famous shift-key on iOS, what the hell were they thinking?
- buttons are often indistinguishable from non-interactive label, leading to idiotic trial and error clicking to find out which UI elements do something
- scroll-bars that are hidden by default, loosing the information how far I am into a document (OSX)
- changing and moving things around just for the sake of confusing existing users, not making anything more intuitive (especially Windows is guilty of this)
And so on and on... the icon design is the least of the problems (and every OS worth its salt should allow to replace the icon theme anyway).
One important reason I'm going back to the command line more and more is because UIs have become so unusable for anything that goes beyond browsing an image collection. Change itself is only good if it results in improvements, but in the area of UI design, things that have been working just fine for 20 years have been broken for superficial visual effects.
It's like 90's web designers took over and are building operating system UIs now (and may be there's a bit of truth in it).
It's not like the past was perfect of course, I mean... Alt-F4, Alt-TAB, ... but that was on Windows which was always laughed at for its poor usability (at least from view of AmigaOS and MacOS users).
I think a lot of it has to do with discoverability (or lack thereof) - e.g. buttons, which used to actually look like things you could depress, have turned into little icons that often don't even have a border. It makes it harder to know whether something is a button or just an indicator, or even purely decorative. The trend seems to be to hide everything away in (at times multiple) layers of submenus, require various gestures (with no hints that you can), and offer little in the way of context-sensitive help.
There's a famous story about early UI fail in some CAD software.
Icons had just come into vogue (yes, there was a time before icons). The CAD system in question used a puck on a big mat to choose functions from a grid of names, which were labels like GRAPH and CONNECT and DEL and so forth. But all-caps names weren't very sexy, so the company decided to replace them with more intuitive icons, cool little pictures of the operations. Getting rid of the tiresome and uncool simple text labels was going to win back market share!
Predictably, users complained that they had a hell of a time trying to figure out which of the tiny, intuitive pictures corresponded to the concrete operations.
The company's response? Supply users with a printed cheat sheet that let them find the icon for each operation. To do a CONNECT, you'd look at the cheat sheet and find the corresponding essentially arbitrary (but intuitive!) squiggle, then search for the intuitive squiggle in a sea of other intuitive squiggles. ("No, not that one!")
Personally I liked the old way when there was a crappy low resolution icon, with text underneath telling you what it was. In most interfaces since the text disappeared it takes me a while to work out what at least some of the icons are.
I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like.
I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not.
We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!
But from a human/usability standpoint (what actually matters), I agree that they are indeed a failure.
From a human/usability standpoint, most icons used in user interfaces are failures.
Not sure you believe me? Quick! Name five icons you often use in a piece of software you use regularly: your browser, IDE, spreadsheet, graphics package, whatever.
Now name five more.
If you’re like most people, you probably came up with the first five easily enough. Back, refresh, stop, home, forward. Save, print, bold, cut, paste. But by the time you were getting toward ten, were you starting to struggle?
Now consider that many of these applications line up rows of 10, 20, or even more icons, which all look rather non-descript and blurry at typical sizes anyway. Some applications have several such rows, some at different sizes, some horizontal, some vertical. That’s an awful lot of screen space for something that most users won’t use, at least not without doing the mouse-hover-tooltip-no-it’s-not-that-one-maybe-it’s-the-one-over-there thing.
Oh, and here’s the kicker: of the icons that do get widely used, only a tiny number are truly iconic pictures that are recognisable! A lot are just an arbitrary marker in a predictable position, and it’s that context that the user recognises.
Except for cryptic icons, those seem on the rise again.
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