Could we kill the icon?

http://joecritchley.svbtle.com/kill-the-icon

by vxNsr • 13 years ago

25 54 13 years ago

joecritchley.svbtle.com

julespitt• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

jared314• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

dennis_vartan• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

mmagin2• 13 years 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.

krapp4• 13 years 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.

wvenable3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

into the trash

"skeuomorph!"

Rumudiez• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

wvenable3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

Tloewald• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

No, what is aqua? As a non-designer who keeps an eye on design trends, I've honestly never heard of it.

Fice2• 13 years 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).

news_to_me• 13 years ago

Yeah, but if you keep going you could say the command line is skeuomorphic just by being text: it's the digital equivalent to typewritten text.

If you go further, you could say that the glyphs of the letters themselves are skeuomorphs, in the same way that icons are.

When it comes down to it, buttons are a simple and effective interface, regardless of whether or not they represent some physical or historical analog.

Gormo4• 13 years ago

What's a "true" digital UI?

If you're going to say buttons and tabs are skeuomorphic, what isn't skeuomorphic? Interacting with a CLI resembles the back-and-forth query and response of conversational dialogue: it's skeuomorphic too!

Here's a question for you: what, exactly, is wrong with using metaphors for existing, well-known analogues to convey information in a new context? Isn't this how languages, notational conventions, and symbolic connotations naturally evolve among humans? I understand why people are tired of Apple's excess, but what's the problem with skeuomorphism per se?

Zoepfli• 13 years 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.

Gormo4• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Probably, but we wouldn't want to.

DrJokepu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

bcoates• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

DDR0• 13 years ago

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

badave• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

krapp4• 13 years ago

GUIs did a formidable job of killing CLIs...

dragonwriter• 13 years 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.

mmagin2• 13 years 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.

krapp4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

DanBC• 13 years 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.

Gormo4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

There is no problem. The "problem"/argument mentioned is manufactured out of pure bullishness toward the current stay of things.

miguelrochefort• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

krapp4• 13 years 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.

wvenable3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Could we kill the icon?

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