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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."
Let's start a concerted effort to replace them all with emoticons and lolspeak! It's the only language the younger generation understands nowadays, and it will surely withstand the test of time, at least until everyone (or at least the majority of the world's population) speaks Chinese.
file save: => 101010 .cpp
radio buttons -> mutually exclusive buttons: oooOoo
clipboards -> tablets: [_]
bookmarks -> googling: [I'm feeling lucky]
Address books -> meatspace latitude: #
Calendars -> evites: [why are you late!]
Voicemail -> audiospam: (_o.O_)
Manila folder -> tag: [_^gt;
Handset phone -> smartphone: [_]-
Magnifying glass -> antburner: --O
Binoculars -> autofilter: >-
Envelopes -> GPG header: -- GPG Block --
Wrenches -> Text XML settings: <?xml?>
Gears -> Binary XML settings: 0_o
Microphones -> smartphones: [_]-
Photography -> smarthpones: [_]-
Televisions -> tablets: [_]
Carbon Copies -> DRM: Unskippable [FBI WARNING:]
Blueprints -gt; code:
OK, that was easy, next!
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.
Microphones...still used everywhere, they've just changed their shape.
Magnifying Glasses..still used to see small things, or did I miss out on the genetic change given people 20-10 eyesight.
Binoculars...see Magnifying glasses [I suppose they are less common just because fewer people seem to be spending time experiencing the great outdoors].
Televisions...um, what Universe is this tool living in?
Wrenches and Gears...I guess once everyone now over 30 dies, civilization ends or everything has switched to using magnets
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Wrenches, gears, magnifying glasses, screw drivers. These are not obsolete tools. Kids still ride bicycles. Bicycles still have gears and near screw drivers and wrenches for adjustment and repair. Magnifying glasses aren't the most useful of items but they are still cheap and as often seen now as 20 years ago.
But all the other ones are just plain wrong...
Only the name is wrong with radio buttons...
I, and most other people who have to take paperwork away from a desk, use clipboards daily,
Books are still quite normal around here, especially if you've been to school,
People still use address books and calenders, electronic devices supplement them,
Voicemail icon yes, it is dated,
Every office I've been in has had lots of beige folders,
Almost every desk phone has a handset that looks somewhat like that, even VoIP phones,
Physical magnifying glasses and binocuilars are still for looking for stuff,
Most people around here still get at least bills in envelopes,
If said 20-something has ever known anyone who took shop classes they should know what a wrench is (though what a wrench has to do with settings, I don't know),
Microphones like that are still used in recording studios and on bar stages,
Polaroids look like prints...,
Might not know why it's got feelers, but it still looks like a TV,
Last time I made a carbon copy, I was filling out a waybill... last Thursday (also a mimeograph machine does not do carbon copies, it makes mimeographs)
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.
It doesn't actually matter if a kid has never seen a reel-to-reel tape player. The thing about symbols is, eventually they can stop being metaphors and start to have meaning in *themselves*.
Take for example the ampersand, &. It's a stylized, abbreviated form of the Latin word "et", meaning "and". You probably didn't know that, but you don't need to know Latin to understand that & means "and". The Latin letter "B" comes from the Phoenecian letter "bet" which also means "house", possibly because the letter once looked a bit like one. At this point the symbol is so far removed from its origin that we're not sure, but nobody cares. The Japanese katakana and hiragana writing systems work in a similar way: they're simplified versions of characters derived from Chinese symbols, and originally represented a word that starts with a certain sound. But now they just stand for the sound itself.
The same thing is happening with icons. 200 years from now, nobody will know what magnetic tape was, but so long as my new phone uses the same symbol for "voicemail" that my last one did, I'll be able to use it just fine.
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.
What the shit kind of haphazard article was this?
I can see how the fast pace of technological evolution can make other things seem glacial, but some of those things were a fucking stretch beyond measure.
Does he think we already live in a paperless society?
Because clipboards, manila folders, envelopes, and calendars all still exist and are commonplace.
And taking issue with binoculars and magnifying glasses? I guess as a technologically advanced people, we've replaced basic optics with what, psychic powers to conveniently amplify the size of things for our comprehension?
He goes on to make a statement about how they are confusing and whatnot (no they aren't, Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to search for clues and shit), but how does that even deal with his preface of the article, which is about anachronism?
And I can see how the phone's silhouette is one that isn't QUITE the most modern thing... but honestly what would you update it with? A little metal rectangle to represent the candy-bar phones we have now? Honestly the next best thing is probably the Motorola-Brick, which is iconic as a cell-phone, but existed concurrently with those phone silhouettes anyway.
Other no-duh's include Studio mics (vs. what else would you use? A pinhole to represent the integrated mic in a webcam?), and who the fuck doesn't recognize a gear or a screwdriver as the innards of something?
And finally, regarding
I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape
given http://searchdatamanagement.rl.techtarget.co.uk/detail/RES/1320101138_161.html that article, I'm not so sure this guy even understands the world beyond just what he himself specifically sees and touches.
Basically, he tried to justify a full blown article based on his observation of: Floppies, and Radio Buttons.
The person that wrote this acts as if no one under 30 has ever seen any of these objects; to say so is completely ludicrous. I'm 28 and I have used floppy discs since I was 7, I've spoken on a telephone (over a cellphone) for most of my life, I've driven an older car with radio buttons, and I read books and like to keep my place. To assume anyone under 30 doesn't use tools, remember when polaroid went out of business, or owned a calendar is completely ignorant. Does everyone over 30 automatically have specific knowledge of these things? Does this make everyone under 30 completely ignorant to anything produced prior to the 1990s? Fuck off.
The term is 'skeumorph' - it's like a wheel with decorative spokes. The wheel no longer needs them for strength, but they're there because a wheel 'needs' spokes.
The other obvious one is camera apps making a shutter sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
This is nothing new. We still talk about pencil lead even though it's been graphite since Roman times, bands cutting new tracks though wax recording is long past, calculus though we don't count with stones, and dialing phones though the rotary phone is nearly extinct. "Pump the brakes" has enjoyed a renaissance of popularity as a slang phrase despite antilock brakes being universal, and people still go balls to the wall or run out of steam.
It's more important that these icons and idioms are standard and well-understood than that people remember their origins.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
Agreed. In a split second I can recognize text in a wide variety of fonts. Don't make me take an extra second to think about what your specific icon does -- or far, far, worse, make me take an extra four seconds to hover the mouse over it for a tool tip because you wanted to get super creative with the icons.
First it was Microsoft and replacing text menus for the ribbon, now Google and replacing text on Gmail buttons with icons. There's a war on usability and its instigators are UI designers.
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
You have to have SOME icon for things, there is no reason to change it arbitrarily to shit nobody understands. People know that the calendar icon gets you, well a calendar even if they've never seen a real calendar.
Then as you point out most of them are not at all archaic. Manila folders still dominate filing cabinets at businesses, TVs don't look like they did in the 50s, but TVs are still everywhere and not dropping in numbers. Wrenches are same as they ever were and if you own a house, you either have a wrench or will have one soon enough.
This was just an article written by some moronic 19 year old hipster who has fuck-all experience with the world. "Oh these are things I've never seen in Starbucks or my philosophy 101 classroom, clearly they are obsolete!"
Also, funny enough, companies do update their iconography. Like in Windows it uses an icon that looks like a widescreen LCD HDTV to represent a TV (for things like HDMI outs in the sound panel or the like). They do generally modernize the look as time goes on.
However ultimately it doesn't matter. If we recognize the icon as meaning something, we will continue to. Hell take a look at the icon for Steam. It is a black background with a strange white joint on it. It is just the logo Valve made for Steam. I don't know what it is supposed to represent, if anything. Doesn't matter, I instantly recognize it and my brain says "That is Steam." Same shit with any other icon.
Punched paper tape. Punched cards. Core memory. Teletypes. Vacuum tubes. TV dinners in aluminum trays covered with aluminum foil. Mechanical calculators. 78 RPM records.
I'm 63. You kids get the hell off my lawn and take your damned revisionist icons with you. The $ sign has been good for 150 years and I'll be damned if you want to screw with it. Take my floppy from my cold, dead hands I say. Whimper. Leave Gramps to die in peace, you whippersnappers with your iPads and clouds.
Actually, modern interfaces are confusing as hell because user interface design has become so screwed up. When you use Gmail, some functions cannot be found, do not appear, until you're in the right region with the cursor and in the right mode of operation. It is confusing as hell when every new app uses it's own damned UI scheme created by a slacker who likes videogames and puzzles. So those who complain about the obsolescence of icons, how about creating usable software instead of complaining. And now again: lawn, off. Now.
You talk about the $ sign. *I* remember when it had TWO vertical bars. Lazy 60 year olds.
rewriting history since 2109
I had a chuckle a couple of days ago when I saw the VirtualBox "Clone" menu icon to be a sheep.
Agreed, there was nothing that required the floppy icon to mean Save and not Open. (Or even File-Manager. Click on the disk to view what's on the disk, wouldn't that make sense?)
What the icons mean is mostly arbitrary. But like the controls on cars, once the manufacturers standardised, it meant anyone who could drive, could quickly adapt to any new model. The current trend towards highly generic mono outline icons, different in nearly every program even on the same platform, is completely counter-productive.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Or maybe by a "carriage return" followed by a "line feed." You see, the text I am writing, and that you are reading, is written in ASCII which is based on the Model 33 Teletype. On a Teletype, a carriage return character (0x0D) would cause the print head to travel all the way to the left; a line feed (0x0A) would cause a roll of paper to move vertically upward by one line.
The modern experience of "going online" is derived from the fact that the Model 33 Teletype had a rotary switch that controlled an electric motor. This switch had three positions, "Line," "Off, and "Local." At my high school, one prepared computer programs in BASIC using "Local" mode so that the program could be punched onto paper tape, one character at a time, while the Teletype was disconnected from the computer system.
Use of computer systems had to be paid for according to the amount of time used, measured in seconds or even milliseconds. Computer time was then too expensive for a user to be allowed to sit at the Teletype keyboard and manually enter keystrokes; instead, after the entire program was punched onto paper tape, the switch would be turned to the "Line" position and the paper tape reader would cause the program to be transmitted to the computer at the Teletype's maximum speed of 110 baud. This was known as "going on Line."
Early microcomputer systems, like larger computers, used Teletypes as I/O devices and ASCII was used internally to store and interpret alphanumeric data. This continued long after users migrated from Teletypes to video display terminals, e.g. DEC VT-100, and then to the IBM PC as the I/O device of choice. Many special function keys from the Model 33 remain in use to this day, for example the Esc (0x1B), Ctrl, Backspace (0x08), Tab (0x09) and DEL (0x7F) keys. The DEL (Delete) code is 0x7F because hitting DEL would cause all the holes in that row of paper tape to be punched (get it, 0x7F). So if you made a typing mistake you could back up the paper tape by one character and type DEL, this would punch through your errant character and the computer would ignore the DEL character.
Next week we'll examine the outdated gestures like the handshake and the military salute.
Jeesh, do kids born after 1500 even know what these things mean?!
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.
While I am not able to remember when I last saw a floppy disk icon I appreciate and identify with your insatiable thirst for cherry picking and hyperbole.
Radio buttons... Thanks for the education. I never gave it a second thought or made that connection because like yourself I'm a fucking idiot. Speaking of connections how does this label count as an icon that "does not make sense" anymore? What icon? And since when the hell do non-programmers (using term very loosly) even know radio buttons are called radio buttons anyway?
'No, books didn't "keep our place when we turned them off."' Personally I use old movie tickets as bookmarks while debugging my punch cards.
"I use folders because I use the 43 Folders organizational system"
You admit even you use folders and yet this still makes your list of 14 icons that don't make sense anymore. Why is your nonsense even on slashdot? How much moola did it take to get ./ to sell its soul? Why am I wasting my time replying to this? I suspect its cause we're both fucking idiots.
"The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched in 20 years, unless you've used a pay phone recently."
What you really meant to say was "I have not had a job in 20 years"
"Soon the envelope itself will go away and the next generation will wonder what this rectangle means and what it has to do with email. "
Hate to break it to ya snail mail aint not going nowhere anytime soon. I'm drawn like a bug to headlights to origional point of this exercise.. "14 other old people icons that don't make sense anymore". I understand you may think the flux capacitor you ordered off ebay was sold as a "prop" only to cover for its amazing properties just as the xbox360 "box only" I ordered contained an actual xbox360.
"If you don't know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a old-style microphone?"
I know right cause if you like google "usb microphone" only modern futurastic usb era microphones appear and they look NOTHING like that icon.
"Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives."
Now your just being rude and condescending. What I might have said previously in humor I mean sincerely now "FUCK YOU".
"No one under 30 has seen a Polaroid in years but we keep using them for icons. Instagram sold for $1B with an icon whose subtlety was lost on its target audience"
Ok so your under 30... now lets see if we can narrow the field with our "binoculars"... 12? 11?.. close?
That instagram icon does not show any slots with pictures coming out of it. In fact it does not even remotly resemble a real polariod camera at all. The only resembelence I see is a misplaced iconic rainbow stripe. It actually resembles a nondescript film camera. Instagram uses such icons because nostalgia is the whole fucking point of instagram.
I'm 59 and I say 'change the channel', but everybody says 'dial the phone' when we haven't had phones with rotary dials in years. And we still say 'roll up the window' even though our cars have power windows.
Icons are like speech in that respect. They have become part of the language. Changing them willy-nilly only confuses people.
What's wrong with Auto-save
In theory, a program could add a revision for every keystroke. But if you want to revert to a previous revision, it'd be tedious to find the right revision that way. In addition, it'd need to keep the hard drive spinning all the time to store all the diffs in case of power failure. Even in an application with automatic saving, the "save" button still has a purpose, namely to mark a revision as worth keeping.
Fact: The standards, Unicode in particular, do not specify one or two lines in the "currency symbol". That is left to the font to decide.
I learned this while setting up a currency database. Apparently Brazil (I think it was Brazil) uses the double-barred symbol for *their* currency, and the single-barred for "US Dollars", which are also in relatively common use. Pretty decent idea for distinguishing currencies, IMO - is sure beats US$ vs CA$, or using ISO 4217 codes.
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".
Wow. I'm a real person here, FYI. There are more words in your comment than in the post itself.
It was a 20 min silly little throwaway post I did at lunch. I'm sorry it offended your sensibilities, but at least it gave you a chance to vent on the internet.
- Scott
http://hanselman.com