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Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
theodp writes "The Floppy Disk Icon, observes Scott Hanselman, means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. That, and other old people icons that don't make sense anymore — Radio Buttons, Clipboards, Bookmarks, Address Books and Calendars, Voicemail, Manila Folder, Handset Phone, Magnifying Glass and Binoculars, Envelopes, Wrenches and Gears, Microphones, Photography, Televisions, Carbon Copies and Blueprints — are the subject of Hanselman's post on icons that are near or past retirement age, whose continued use is likely to make them iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery to many."
Old people are the only ones who need icons to map directly to physical objects they're familiar with. Younger people simply learn the meanings of the icons directly, and they can look them up on Google or Wikipedia if they're curious about the icons' history.
Borgified Bill Gates representing Microsoft?
not when your screen resolution at best was 640x480, and you had dozens of actions on the toolbar
So what do we use? Should we have a picture of a piece of fiber for everything? Maybe a few ones and zeroes? This is a non-issue by a blogger without enough new ideas.
I'm somewhat scared that people have never had to use a wrench to fix anything. Most of the self-respecting geeks I know are also gearheads... No one is a musician any more? Microphones are unknown to most people? I agree...What Universe is this tool living in?
Business plan for making $3.50 online:
1. Be an ignorant hipster microserf excitable attention whore
2. Write an ignorant article that makes you and your equally unenlightened followers giddy
3. Submit to slashdot and hope it's one of those new moronic editors who reviews it
4. Traffic
5. ??? (hint: cinnamon-chai lattés until your head implodes)
6. PROFIT!
This site's getting so bad, it's making Gizmodo look good.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The dollar sign is thought to be a slash through an eight representing 'pieces of eight', an older Spanish currency denomination, but everyone still knows what $ means. Icons that everyone is used to and that can be recognized as to their function should be left alone, for efficiency and a nice little piece of nostalgia.
I feel stupid saying this, but before reading this blurb (I refuse to click the link and give this guy hits), I never made the connection that radio buttons were from the old push-down / pop-up radio buttons.
Which just goes to show, iconography or UI elements don't have to have a connection to something commonly used or known to be understood. I've been able to use radio buttons fine for decades without realizing what the historical antecedent was.
Besides, who today hasn't seen a clipboard, bookmark, calendar, manila folder, magnifying glass, binocular, envelope, wrench or gears, microphone, photograph, or television? I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that in 50 years, all those things will still exist and still be commonly known. Most of those things are necessary as long as being a human still involves interacting with the physical world in some way. I don't think books will disappear, and I don't think tablets will end paper. Even if the devices themselves change (ie, binocular or magnifying glass into a unified electric optical device?), the analog remains.
Address Books and handset phones are likely to be things of the past, carbon copies pretty rare (though still very common today), and blue prints probably in the dustbin of history. If we got rid of "carbon copy" what would we rename the CC field to? "Other addresses that this message should go to, but not be the primary recipient of?" And BCC?
When I read the article I felt like the world at large has failed. With the resurgence of the DIY genre, why do the young ones have to be ignorant of history? It seems like the intention is to forget all that came before, so nobody can have an original idea. The irony is that many great, original, ideas are a rehash of some previous idea because it was the best way to do something.
As someone who grew up using floppies, building computers, learning to program, and finally leaving that arena to explore a career in one of the oldest professions, metalworking, I have a particular spot for history and nostalgia.
Just because every 14 year old kid has an ARM A5 processor strapped to them doesn't mean the lessons that were learned in the 80's, innovating computers and electronics, aren't just as applicable today.
I feel it takes an appreciation for the classical trades and the way things *were* done, to truly appreciate what we have -- and apply the hard won principles of yesteryear to tomorrow.
Sure, those icons stand for concepts that we rarely use today, but many of them were "obsolete" when they were invented. Further, what would we replace them with, what are the analogues today that people will unmistakebly associate those actions with? What, two fingers making a V? How about a curly swipey gesture?
The world is full of things past and present, let's not throw them away because the "future" beckons "futuristic" notions.
This article might have been interesting if it had actually suggested replacement icons.
But just pointing out that they're old?
It doesn't matter that their old, everyone that uses them knows what the icons mean because they've 'always' meant that. And those that don't just use menus.
Indeed, it's easy to complain, but difficult to offer real alternatives. Our world is increasingly non-physical such that there are few if any replacement images these days. So it seems you have 3 choices:
1. Use old-fashioned ideas
2. Use new-fashioned ones, which are either confusingly abstract or don't exist.
3. Don't use icons, period.
Most people recognize images faster than words (once learned), so 3 is out.
So let's see what you have with #2 before we toss #1. Show them or put up.
Table-ized A.I.
Symbols are passed on and re-purposed all the time.
Just because the Medici family isn't all that these days doesn't mean the 3 balls aren't still the symbol for pawn broker.
Or what about that cross for Christianity? These modern day kids haven't seen any crucifixions lately. How will they relate? Might want to throw out Lady Justice and her scales along with the Caduceus while we are at it.
The bad ones will die off (voice mail is particularly unintuitive), the others live on just because they are distinctive. Abstract Square, not so much.
Where's the "And git off my lawn!" icon when you need it.
Table-ized A.I.
Icons work because we have learned what the symbol means not because the symbol makes sense. Red Cross and the biohazard sign are examples of this.
If you change the symbol you have to learn everybody the meaning of the new symbol instead of just learning children the meaning of the old one.
Furthermore you don't have any guarantee that the shiny new symbol will be meaningful in a couple of years.
We maintain many symbols that don't make sense in a modern context anymore.
They're symbols. We use them because they mean something. They are as useful as they are easily understood. If due to these modern changes people no longer understand what the symbols mean, THEN they'll be bad. But so long as people know what they mean they're fine.
The objective is communication. That's the point of symbols. Until they're not understood they should remain unchanged. By all means, suggest alternatives and try to use them. But don't act like everyone else is doing the world a disservice by not following along.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Icons are originally designed to resemble what they mean; making it easier to recognize and remember what they mean. Besides, icons (and pictures in general) can code much more information in a small space; this is a reflection of our incredible abilities to recognize shapes, colours and textures. On the other hand, text don't allow such mechanisms: words have the same overall shape and their meaning is heavily based on conventions. For instance, some people know how to justify text in Word, but they have no clue that the word for that is "justify". Finally, some icons end up becoming sort of general symbols, where the meaning is defined by convention (this very article talk about this). In this case, they are still more useful then text because, as I said, encoding meaning in visual features is generally more efficient then using words.
Whether you are conscious of it or not, your brain is wired so it can recognize a pattern, silhouette, or specific color or movement much faster than it can input, decipher, and act on a string of text. This is a remnant of our wilderness instincts where we needed to be able to identify friend, foe, prey or predator in a split second and our lives depended on our reaction time.
If you really don't know what these icons mean, it doesn't matter. People who have never seen the object before will just associate it with its action, whatever that may be. If they need to know the etymology of an icon, they can ask an 'old person' or Google it.
Often your brain doesn't do any more thinking about the action than "click blue and orange swirly thing icon over there". You probably also know that when I said "Blue and orange swirly thing icon" i meant the Firefox logo. If you have seen this icon as much as any reasonable tech head would, your brain has it imprinted and you recognize it at a single glance - even if you don't search the icon for details of what it does(which is apparently encircle a blue marble in an immolated fox of questionable aliveness).
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
No one has the slightest idea what the icons are.
It would take quite the academic to not know what binoculars are. Seriously, almost everything in the world is a throwback/reference to something that nobody uses/knows what it is any more. Compared to the English language, these icons are stupidly up to date. Fact is, they become self referencing and everyone knows what they mean. I don't want a big long box that says Address book when I can click on an easily recognisable icon. Stop fucking about with a system that works perfectly because of some flawed ideology.
Symbols made up of 26 basic building blocks which I already recognize, and which can be unambiguously interpreted when I don't recognize the symbol as a whole?
That's nice... now try porting your software to a language other than English, where the word for "save" may be more than twice the number of letters. While you're at it, try having it look generally the same so that your online documentation doesn't need different pictures for every language on the planet. Try, also, working in a differently localized version of the software, when muscle memory becomes a large part of your using the function buttons. Oops... you meant to click Undo, but instead clicked Save, because the button is 3x the size that it was in the English version.
There's a reason that software developers use icons with text descriptions on mouseover. It's not just about saving space, it's about portability, not having to redesign the UI completely for every translation, and because *normal* people don't have a hard time learning what an icon does, and once they've learned that, it's much faster than having to read the text on a button.
Just how do you mouse-over on a touch-device? (They're plagued with those meaningless mono outline type icons.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
What's wrong with Auto-save
In theory, a program could add a revision for every keystroke. But if you want to revert to a previous revision, it'd be tedious to find the right revision that way. In addition, it'd need to keep the hard drive spinning all the time to store all the diffs in case of power failure. Even in an application with automatic saving, the "save" button still has a purpose, namely to mark a revision as worth keeping.
Every time you have to take your hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse or flick the trackpad, you lose time.
Every time you take your hand off the mouse or trackpad and line it up on the keyboard again, you lose time.
The idiot who came up with the idea of requiring both mouse and keyboard input for one UI metaphor was a complete and utter freakin' MORON with absolutely NO UI design experience worth noting.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
UIs have indeed gone downhill a bit. The Public Storage website provides a typical example. They use orange or else light gray text on a white background, rendering contrast down to terrible levels. The default font size for data fields is tiny too. The readability is terrible and nobody there cares.
I attribute this to companies hiring the youngest and cheapest labor they can (and the least experienced), or offshoring dev.
In general UIs are in poor times. The Microsoft Ribbon's issues with consistency of access to functions is a large demonstration of this. (One of many examples: numbering functions in Word can be approached multiple ways in the UI, and some ways/paths omit critical settings the other paths have, leaving the user clueless how to do what he needs to do.) Marketers or hotshot visual designers run the show, and the result slaps the user in the face repeatedly.
As far as icons go, those trying to free them from their history are not considering the human perception issue. It's like some 17 year old who doesn't like red and green traffic lights and has the power to replace them with the words "CAN HAZ WALK?" and "RUN DOOD RUN".
The reason the current icons are good is that they are now unambiguous in their meaning, being up to date with current culture/tech has no bearing on this. The dated-ness of them actually helps, since they come from an age of unitaskers. They are good simply because each icon can only have one possible, reasonable interpretation.* If you were to try and make them modern, in our age of multitaskers, you'd get generic meaningless icons.
*ok, clipboard for paste, but not copy is a little ambiguous, but always appears near the less ambiguous paper doppelganger for "copy."
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8