Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake.
(It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first that started to lose their carefully collected UI expertise and replace it something that was original for the time, but that was all. E.g. I remember the very first ads after Jobs' comeback. They still had the beige Macintoshes, but their ads changed. Instead of a typical computer ad that showed a computer with a turned on screen and some desktop picture Apple's ads pictured turned off computers photographed from unusual angles or in unusual positions, like keyboard standing on its side leaning on the box, mouse hanging on its wire and so on. It was different, indeed, it stood out. Thing is, to always strive for that is harmful. Especially for user interface, where the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
So the rule of thumb is that: if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it.
One of first programs that put pictograms in menus was Microsoft Word. But the way Word did it was entirely different from what we do now. Microsoft Word had toolbars and their buttons, of course, were mostly pictorial. Toolbars could be turned on and off and users could assemble their own toolbars. Microsoft Word's menus displayed pictograms only for the commands that could also be called with currently visible toolbars. Have a toolbar visible? Its pictograms will appear in the menu. Closed that toolbar? The pictograms disappeared. The pictogram did not merely decorate a command, but also provided a hint that the user could call the command with a toolbar. This is informational. This is the right use.
Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform. It lets you skip reading all the text when you're familiar with a dialogue, and you can short circuit what you need to click on without having to read
That's the reason why pictographic additions are so useful. Its the reason why we distinguish different kinds of UI elements at all, because colour and graphics are incredibly powerful shortcuts for parsing information
This. If I'm out looking for a "Save" button, I'm going to pattern match "ancient disk icon" without even thinking about it.
It's also the reason why some menu entries get icons and others don't.
If the icon doesn't convey information by itself (like a "move to top" icon example), then it's there as a visual anchor - and you don't really need to have 4 of the same "delete" icon if a menu has 4 different "delete" options next to each other. Just one is enough of an anchor to draw your attention to the "delete group", and having just one keeps the visual noise low.
Likewise, you don't need visual anchors for every single option - just the commonly used ones, the ones you expect people to be looking for, and the ones that already have established pictography.
Even though floppy disks were a bit before my time and I rarely ever used them, seeing them be called ancient disk makes me wanna find the nearest coffin and just go lie down. :D
What may be added is that some people have a hard time reading words by their 'total shape'. I can imagine that for them, the difference between pattern matching symbols and strings of letters is even more profound.
> Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform
I'd disagree but either way throw another factor in: non-native speakers and cross-language usability.
If your software is in some language and you are looking at docs or a videotutorial or something in another language, it's often hard to translate specific terms, Icons don't change language. They also help if you have to do something in another machine that uses a different language for some reason.
Look at the traffic signs. You have very limited time to read the sign. That's the reason they have distinct patterns and rarely (except in USA) rely on blocks of text.
So do I want the button with the three horizontal lines, three horizontal dots, three vertical dots, nine dots arranged in a grid, the point-down triangle, or the point-right chevron? Generally these convey no information and I have to try each one to find the option I want. If it exists.
hamburger icon: originally, in older Android UI guidelines, provides access to a list of items that can be used to navigate between parts of a large UI. But at this point, pretty much evolved to mean "click to access a menu" on UIs that don't have a menu bar.
Three vertical dots: "More stuff that doesn't fit on a toolbar because the display on your current device isn't wide enough".
Three horizontal dots: click this item to access a dialog.
Point-down triangle: Select an value from a list.
There may be slight variations depending on the UI guidelines for the platform you are using (or designing for).
All enormously useful icons that provide specific context and meaning. I can't say that I've ever seen a piece of serious software that abuses those conventions.
> if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it.
If the text on the button is always the same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. Just use the position.
And if the position is always the same, it is decorative, and we'd pretty much rather discard it too and use time, which does not stay the same by definition, and make them stupids click anywhere spatially but on precise time: t % 2 == 0 => action 1, t % 3 == 0 => action 2 etc - but that would be too much of a disrespect towards users, however stupid - and we have no choice but randomize those iconless textless positions dynamically.
Classic Mac OS window headers had striped or dot patterns that were kind of similar to rugged parts of various physical tool handles. So they were both decorative in a way and informational: this is a part you can hold and drag around. A typical interface will have a lot of such parts that are both functional and decorative, so it will feel just right.
Purely decorative parts are also possible (and even desirable), but they should be personal. A set of colors chosen by the user, a background texture, a picture that the user keeps on the desktop and so on.
Everything in a UI needs to not hinder usefulness. Adding more information signals (icons) which don't actually convey meaning is clutter that makes the UI harder to parse. That factor is far more important than whether it feels "alive".
Menus should not feel alive. Because they are menus, at any given point they mostly contain things the user does not want to interact with right now. Menu icons that serve as visual anchors are good, they help the task of finding the desired action, as well as building a visual memory. Icons everywhere achieve the opposite, for the spurious benefit of visual consistency. Menu items are not consistent affordances, they perform very different actions that are at best related, but oftentimes they are there because they need to be somewhere.
A decorative element can be fine in a design model, but 1) a good design tends to have no purely decorative elements, and 2) it becomes problematic when the decorative element looks like a meaningful element but does not actually carry meaning (or the intended meaning).
We all recognise an icon in a menu as a meaningful element. Treating it as a decorative element is wrong and adds mental overhead, as we tend to scan every one of those icons (putting it at the beginning of menu text, i.e., to the left for LTR languages, makes it worse). It is well-known we do tend to scan these icons because that is the reason icons work: repeated exposure creates intuition. If this intuition is not put to use, then all such icons are a waste of our attention.
For example, a bullet in a list: fine (differentiates where each list item starts), window shadow or the 3D effect on window close buttons: fine (meaningful in terms if differentiating areas in the GUI, not pretending to do more); whitespace to set apart one thing more from another thing than from the third thing: fine (if that reflects the relationship between those things).
You remind me of my favourite bit of Windows software ever[0]. It made the desktop feel really alive with things like can-can girls and humanoid fish flying around your "living wallpaper".
Then again it was named Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, so maybe it's not such a good idea for the default environment of a general-purpose operating system.
... until the not-useful becomes distracting and/or causes information overload.
In the case of Apple, I've been a user of the Accessibility menu ever since they introduced the stupid parallax wiggling of the icons. Right now i use: reduce motion, bold text and reduce transparency. Because I want to see what I'm looking for when using the phone and not squint through pointless effects.
JetBrains products had colorful and useful pictograms on menu items and panels.
One day they replaced them by B&W versions and it was fail.
Few years later they introduced purple icons. For promoting some internal AI companion.
> Their purpose is to convey information in limited space.
No, that's only one of their purposes. Another one is faster visual parsing of shape recognition instead of reading even if space is not an issue (just like with all of these menus, they waste so much space on padding they could fit command names 3 more times)
Right; but this is also information. The Civilization game used little pictures of wheat and shields, I think, to indicate the production levels. Here the pictures are better than numbers because they feel more like actual things and allow to express all the details we need. We understand smaller numbers differently, three vs five is not just arithmetical for us, it is more substantial to actually see three vs five items than a different shape of a digit.
Yes, and as much as I hate to defend modern UI designers, I believe the icons in the menus here are actually extremely helpful (even when duplicated).
In the first example, when I want to find the option to add or delete a row in this massive menu, the icons clearly convey the purpose. I can instantly filter a huge list of possibilities down to a few relevant entries.
yes; I think it depends a lot on how accepted the icon is. Every few months when I have to open ST's CubeProgrammer, my brain substantially deteriorates because they don't use text and the icons for their main tabs are not always understandable to me. (and the thing's otherwise a relic from 20+ years ago)
X, volume & mute icon, disk icon, upload/download icon -- these are all fine and good; you don't need to spell those out for me because their use is so widespread that even if I didn't know what they meant, it'd be very useful to learn. I have no idea what a generic "integrated circuit" icon means, though, and I doubt anyone will use it elsewhere to mean the same thing, so I just click around randomly until I find what I'm looking for, like I'd do with the previously-unlabeled 6-switch panel in my living room where the positioning of the switches have no obvious relation to the physical placement of the ceiling lights.
I think Apple's menu actually shows exactly what I want and expect; show icons if it'll help me, don't show them if they wouldn't; though in come cases, I think Apple could apply some more icons (like for "Stop", there are a few good choices for that).
I disagree, pictures are easier to remember than words and I'm much faster (several hundred miliseconds) at quickly spotting an icon in the 12th place down a list and clicking it because I memorized it visually than reading the actual words.
So icons make power users faster. It's not "clutter". Your argument about "don't use it for aesthetics" is ironic because you're making it because of aesthetics. For me it's about user speed.
I don't mind the size, but lack of colors is annoying. If common icons where color-coded, like green to save, blue to download/print/export, red to delete, UI would be friendlier to use.
I think it is important to stress that both, color _and_ shape should be visible distinctive, and as you say it is important that the color palette is chosen in a way that even if the color does not stand out for a the color-blind person, the contrast stays visible.
Making everything monochrome is surly not more accessible, because there sure are people who find it easier to distinguish by color than shape.
Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them? Icons have until recently always been color coded. That doesn't make them a problem for the color-blind. You can look at the shape of the icons and read the text next to them. Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded? Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
> Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them?
Because pretty much as soon as one starts colour coding items in the UI, people start using the specific colours to encode meaning. If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon in your UI twice, congrats, you just lost 8% of male users!
> Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded?
If they weren't colour-coded, they would have to be differentiated by shape, and then when I traveled to Canada, I wouldn't have to guess whether the fancy horizontal traffic lights are ordered left-to-right or right-to-left
> Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
Even fully colour-sighted folks can't see red very well at night, so yes, white car > red car
Personal anecdote re the traffic lights: I thought "green light" was a metaphor until sometime my twenties, when a friend explained that the 3rd light actually is green to other people. It's always been a white light to me
With that line of reasoning we arrive at the conclusion that all graphical elements of an interface should be removed, as the blind cannot see icons.
> If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon
Color coding has never been about this, only when implemented wrongly. It is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.
> Color coding... is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.
In principle, I agree, but I do not believe I have ever used a software package that follows this philosophy. In practice, once you give people a tool, they are inclined to use it, and most projects only try and address accessibility concerns post-ship
Monochrome is a strange complaint, the text is also monochrome. Regarding what most people think I don't know, I'm definitely faster at spotting a specific pictogram in the start of a line than having to read multiple lower information-density pictograms (alphabet characters) in order (reading a full word or sentence). This seems obvious to me, 1 thing is faster to parse than multiple things.
The monotone ones in Windows 11 that jump around in order or menu position (I think both of these have been addressed in 24h2 or something?) where they hop to the top or bottom of the menu or dont show so the order is wrong if they are disabled for some object are insanely bad UX.
I say this because I agree, the pictogram icon is much easier for me to find. I also like having a word there though, if they change the picture on me. If its not color, almost all bets are off, since I dont even look at the icon, just look for a color and go for it if thats available.
an icon for "save" will suffice to help me find the portion of the menu with "save as", "save a copy", and "export". when all four have the same icon, or slight variations, i'm back to reading each one to discern the difference.
Speak for yourself. I remember words. That disk icon stands for "Save". "Save" is what I remember. I also remember location, but the spatial component applies independent from icons or words.
Limited space seems like a surprising thing to lean on, especially when put next to a text label, with the increase pixel count/resolution on devices over the last 5-10-15 years.
Words create better beginners than icons alone.
UI/UX can evolve as the baseline digital literacy of users evolves usually very slowly, to remain maximally inclusive.
One thing that I'd consider is start with text labels, and the more they are used, start showing an icon. Just hold a left bar for them to start appearing so that learning can happen.
The screenshot where there was only some menu items with icons feels more memorable for that reason.
I hate the monotone ones - I get it, its easy to tick the box that they are colorblind safe or whatever, and its modern design, but man the colors really help me identify what the hell I'm going at in the menu. Brown thingy (clipboard) is copy, black square is save. I'm a simple creature.
From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.
Also, I disagree with:
> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”
Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:
> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?
That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.
I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.
I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).
We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:
1) Those that use interface items with text
2) Those that use interface items with icons
3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.
I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.
If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)
Sounds like me:
1. For new UI/tool, I depend on text to navigate.
2. Once I'm more familiar, I scan using icons first then text to confirm.
3. With enough time, I use just icons.
4. Why the ** do they keep moving it/changing the icons?
This is the bane of my existence since icons aren't standardized* and the vast majority of people suck at designing intuitive ones. (*there are ISO standard symbols but most designers are too "good" to use them)
Cite cliché about the only intuitive user interface is the nipple; everything else is learned.
Having done my share of UI work, my value system transitioned from esthetics to practicalities. Such as "can you describe it?" Because siloed UI, independent of docs, training and tech supp, is awful.
All validated by usability testing, natch. It's hard to maintain strong opinions UI after users shred your best efforts. Humilitating.
Having said all that... If stock icons work (with target user base), I'm all for using them.
Hooray, actual user research and data!! This is what I tell all my clients: "We can speculate all day long, but we don't have to. The users will tell us the correct answer in about 5 minutes."
It's amazing that even in a space like this, of ostensibly highly analytical folks, people still get caught up arguing over things that can be settled immediately with just a little evidence.
What isn't so helpful though is the classic Google Sheets example where it has three different options (Delete Row, Delete Column, etc.) but all with an identical "trashcan" icon.
Genuinely curious if the item types in as shown in the article are that helpful though. They seem small, fiddly, hard to distinguish between, and not especially intuitive.
did not undergo a stroke, but I find myself often navigating menu by memorizing the location in the menu, I also use the icons for memorizing and then I can speed up by not reading.
The first time I noticed that is the time I needed to operate a Finnish Windows machine and I could get it working pretty good by sheer memory
Then I'd argue that not having icons on every item in the menu, and having groups/separators helps more than just having nearly indistinguishable icons everywhere
maybe, but over use of groups can also be confusing
I find icons helpful to visually anchor things in the menu. It can be noisy when there are 5 identical "paste as" icons but generally I see it as a positive
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
There's illiteracy, and there's functional illiteracy. They're not the same, and people often confuse the two. A literally illiterate person (ha!) wouldn't make headway with almost any realistic computer interface, icons or not.
The 20% statistic is about people who have great trouble reading and comprehending simple sentences, not discerning individual words. It's tragic and debilitating, but such people could muddle through a simple interface with textual labels. A truly illiterate person couldn't.
Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p
Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)
But also from an accessibility stand point, providing users with affordances to remove distractions (animations, transitions, and yes, icons) should be an option. But I disagree with the author that the default should be less icons.
I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.
I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.
Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!
This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
I still regard Office '97 as the best UI it ever had. I spent a lot of time inside it, including a couple of years at a bank reconciling corporate actions before I got my first programming job. The ribbon version was awful in comparison.
Many KDE apps (Dolphin, Kate, Okular, etc.) let you configure their tool bars (or get rid of them entirely) and set them to show just icons, text, or both (with the text to the side or below). It's the kind of thing most people won't bother with, but for frequently used applications it's nice to be able to customize it to suit your needs. It's done via a config option though, not by dragging menu items to the toolbar (which strikes me as something you could initiate by mistake).
MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.
…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.
I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.
I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.
It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all.
The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have common shared menu items over the OS or they change their placement throughout the app.
> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.
In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)
It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.
The IKEA instructions are generally regarded as a triumph of simplicity. Yet on more than one occasion I've come across cases where a few words in a call out would have prevented having to redo some step after later realising that some features had to be oriented a particular way - the pictures not quite conveying their intention until it was obvious in hindsight.
Others have brought up the Office 97 style for good reason. Everything has an icon, on an icon toolbar. Every command can also be on a file menu but most of them there don’t have an icon. The ones that do are special or intended to draw your attention.
And there’s a consistent metaphor: for example the web browser is represented by a globe for the world wide web. So the “hyperlink” function is a globe with a chain. This the “preview as web page” is a globe with a magnifying glass (whereas the print preview command is a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.).
This icon language hints at function through its form and helps serve as a cue, a reminder, or a visual representation of
its function.
And it all worked on 640x480 256 color screens. They are thoughtful and useful. These plain flat uninformative icons are just rude.
Sure. There are also icons that are plain flat and don't use metaphor and work great. Play, share, hamburger, bluetooth, power... i am sure there are more. Icons are more about familiarity than anything.
I assume you were very familiar with Office 97. I can tell you people born in 97 are probably not. High chance they might not like and understand the icons because they aren't familiar with them.
It's like when everybody wants to design logo as unforgettable as Nike. But in reality anything people see 20 times a day people will remember.
> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
I wrote it in a different comment elsewhere: this is exactly why you don't want icons on every menu item. When everything tries to be stand out, nothing does. It's much easier to distinguish groups and "it's the third item below the icon" than "out of these identical looking icons one of them points to a menu item that does what I want".
Sure! I agree. My comment above probably seems like i think this new Apple design direction is good. I don't. Tahoe seems like amateur hour.
What i was mainly saying is that the icon does not have to describe the label for it to be effective. That doesn't mean that usage/quality of the icon suddenly doesn't matter.
A lot of apps people use these days are cloud-first and automatically save all the time, so there's not even a save button to have a floppy icon for! The icon to say that it's synced looks like a cloud, and if you're using a web browser it'll probably have a Download button with a download icon. No floppy disks in sight.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's computer users out there that wouldn't recognise the "save icon".
I disagree. Not all it's "autosave on cloud", and some apps keeps having an explicit save something button or option.
I recently had a discussion about replacing the "save icon" (IE. the old floppy disk icon) for an icon with an arrow pointing down, for a button that saves (don't download!) a custom query of the user in the system. Perhaps it could be replaced with another icon, but not by someone that everyone would think is "Download".
My biggest design peeve of the examples posted is the inconsistent indentation of each section of the menu. Where if any single item in the section has an icon it gets indented, but if none do it doesn't, and seeing them next to each other is jarring. I feel this is especially inconsistent design because if a menu item has a check mark it indents all menu items in the whole menu. I would have thought Apple would have the taste to keep things more consistent across the whole menu than that, as it seems sloppy.
There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on?
One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. This is the same problem AWS has. Their dashboard is just noise, because the icons are neither visually distinct nor descriptive of the project.
I've also seen some of this same problem with card and board games as well. You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it, all the icons are big enough that people can make them out sitting upside down in front of the person across the table from them, even if they're over 40.
His first example, Google Sheets, does well by this metric IMO, but the next few are kinda bad.
MacOS was never fun. I've been using MacOS at work for five years and it's never been fun nor intuitive. I always explained this to myself "that's because I grew up with Windows" but three months ago I switched to KDE on my private machine and it's miles ahead of MacOS. Just a week ago I got a new company Macbook and the UX is even clunkier than before. Shit just doesn't work.
I feel like the older versions had much more of a personality. OS 8-9, OS X (10.0-10.9). Once they (and Windows) started with flat design (which was over 10 years ago!) everything just converged and now all UIs look very similar to each other. MacOS Big Sur and Tahoe look quite similar to various 3rd party KDE and Gnome skins that predate them.
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done.
> One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability.
I have this issue with Google apps on my phone. Once they decided that all icons should have the same four blurred colors with low contrast, you just can't tell which app you're looking at without the text label below. And I'm not visually impaired.
> You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it […]
This is something visual artists usually learn and are good at and it's not primarily for accessibility, it's simply good design. Accessibility improves as a side effect.
I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
No. It's laziness and bad design. It's the most generic trash icon from the most generic icon set.
Same with "add row above/below" or the completely distinct action Create Filter/Filter by cell value.
They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought. Especially given the fact that these actions have been around in office software for literal decades, and more often than not with their own distinct icons.
I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.
So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?
> It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to.
No. No, there's no good reason. Google is institutionally incapable of making good designs. Forget good, they can't make sensible designs.
So they whipped out the most generic icon set. Typed "delete" or "add" or "filter" and chose the first icon that popped up for all actions.
Top to bottom:
- Insert column before. left arrow, column (three stacked squares), green plus sign
- Insert row after: green plus sign (in the same position as previous item), row (three squares in a row), arrow down
- Insert cells. Doesn't need an icon, since it's already in the obvious insert group. Or: a single square, green plus sign
-------
- Delete column: column, red cross
- Delete row: row, red cross
- Delete cells: doesn't need an icon. Or: single square, red cross
--------
- Create a filter. Same filter icon with a green plus. This one is so obvious, that only a moron could think it's hard, or there's some reason they didn't do it.
- Filter by cell value. Same icon, or better still a square with filter because there are other filters elsewhere.
You don't need to use language like "moron". It doesn't help the conversation and it's not appropriate. Trying to convince people you are right because you think other people are less intelligent is generally not a strategy that works.
And yes, all of the icons you are describing and linked to can be drawn. I even described these types of combinations myself. The point you're missing is that they are nearly impossible to visually distinguish at a quick glance. When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid. They're difficult to decipher. You have to stop and think about what they actually mean and hope you don't make a mistake.
I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for. They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it. Which is why it's a feature, not a bug, even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action. At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted. Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon is bad design because it makes it slower to figure out the right item, not faster.
Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs. These trade-offs are the kinds of things you learn when you study design, and a huge part of graphic design is getting the trade-offs right in a given context.
> I even described these types of combinations myself.
Not exactly. Re-read what I wrote
> When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid.
1. It was just an example, out of potentially thousands of possible variations. And I described a much simpler one
2. You're complaining about "variations of a grid" and at the same time praise how Google uses literally the same icon for completely different actions
> I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for.
So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it.
> They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it... even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action.
Ah yes, you don't have to think about checks notes that "Create filter" and "Apply filter from cell value" are actually completely different actions with completely different modes of operation, that's why they get a single generic filter icon.
> At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted.
Oh, "read text between identical icons and hope you didn't misread the action you needed" is good, but "read text between similar icons if they are not distinct enough" is bad. Got you
> Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon
So don't cram it. I literally described the most minimal icons that don't cram much info.
Also, there's literally no "crammin of info" in, say, adding a plus sign to a filter icon to designate "create" and to differentiate it from "apply".
Just a few examples of minimal icons. They are from different packs, so their styles and approaches will be different, these are just to illustrate the idea. Also, as you said, not every menu item needs an icon:
Google "designers" literally took a generic icon set, searched for terms "insert", "delete", "filter" and chose the first ones that came up in search. That's it. That's the "hard decision" they had to make.
Which is ironic given that they went out of their way to create varied distinct icons for the top-level menu, but not for the context menu. Or that Google Docs (not Sheets) manages to do all that, and use slightly different icons than Sheets (e.g. for Paste Without Formatting)
> Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs.
What Google shows is not a trade-off. It's either incompetence or non-caring, and I don't know which is worse.
You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon, and it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
> You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon
Tell me you didn't read what I wrote without telling me that.
Literal quote: "So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it."
The rest of my text is showing how your defense of "let's use a generic icon for completely different actions for every menu item" falls apart even with the tiniest of scrutinies
> it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
Literally every menu in every Google Docs is full with unique icons for every menu item except this context menu BTW.
You'd know that if you weren't so hellbent on defending incompetence.
Same here. I view the text labels as a more detailed description I can read if I don’t understand the icon at first glance. The icons help with decreasing time spent searching for the option I want. Not having to read every single menu item saves some number of milliseconds which adds up over time and reduces cognitive load.
All of the Google Docs icons are really thoughtfully designed, with distinctive silhouettes. Instead of making 5 tiny illegible variations on inserting a row/column/etc, they just use the + symbol. Because the symbol is the same, your eye is then drawn to the differing text on the right.
Some of the Apple ones really are ridiculous, like the ones around window management and copy/pasting. Even blown up to fullscreen size, you wouldn't have a chance of guessing what they do. But at display size, they are just plain illegible. Having them there is just a visual distraction.
> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.
They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
Those icons were well-designed for the newly computerized office employee of the day. The new school of icons are made by graphic designers for other graphic designers.
How can you remember the underlined "i" when it's so tiny and also positioned in random places? These should be in their own column just like a checkmark or an icon (but yes, no single key navigation is way worse than bad icons)
I like the idea of placing the hotkeys in a column of their own. Nevertheless, even if the underlined i is sometimes hard to notice, I only need to find it until I've memorized it.
Not sure I agree. It's much easier for me to find the link icon than "Insert Link" in the Google Docs example. It's seem pretty close to a standard icon so, for me at least, it's helpful to find it. Same wit some of the others like increase indent, decrease indent, left, right, center justification, and lots of others.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.
I've heard this kind of reasoning from a number of designers, and it strikes me as post hoc justification for aesthetic self-indulgence.
So, with the greatest of respect, I don't believe you. It does not take you "a couple more milliseconds to scan", since a couple of milliseconds is well below human perceptible thresholds for almost every sense.
There is no accessibility improvement here — you just like the consistency.
I do like how in some MacOS examples we see icons for some of the more important or commonly used menu items, but not the others in the same list. The absence of icons has meaning ("it's likely not what you want")
I think visual signs are an amazing way to impart immediate information at a glance. Take road signs for example, at speed I can know what to expect around the corner.
However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.
Its the same in the GUI. The symbols should allow me to move quicker around the interface, even if I've not used the software before.
The issues I see are each OS/App can, and does, use their own symbols for the same functionality (sure there are some universals like cut/copy/paste). And like the article these symbols now appear to be getting used as bullet points, so each item needs it's bullet points.
In my opinion, and like the greyed out keyboard shortcuts over to the right of some menu items, these symbols should only be there when they denote actions that can be done by clicking a button. They should be imparting the mouse equivalent or those keyboard shortcuts, a way to navigate and do actions; not as some decoration. Imparting the language of the GUI.
So yeah I agree with the article. Function over design aesthetic every time.
> However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.
A lot of countries seem to standardise on similar signs. I have not had a difficulty driving in different countries and visiting more.
Cars are even more standardised. The controls vary very little.
There is a definitely problem with GUIs and the problem seems to be aesthetics and branding trump function.
I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links.
There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.
It's kind of a shame how we keep trying to make icons look uniform, either in color, or in shape.
Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors.
Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almost completely illegible since we've taken away all the things that help set icons apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi...
Yeah, I learned that using Netscape 6 with a row of blue balls for icons; going from the older Mozilla builds with the Netscape 4-style icons it was a definite downgrade. Pheonix had a row of orange balls; they later switched to IE-style icons with distinct shapes, which was better.
The recent Android releases where everything is a squircle really sucks too.
Google has been universally panned for using their logos as app icons. I think most people in this thread are talking about UI vs app icons (essentially avatars for apps at this point).
Visually uniformity is a broad trend that affects both areas. The monochrome line-art UI icons that are used everywhere are every bit as bad as Google's app icons.
Here are some icons I screenshotted off a website. I challenge you to tell me what they mean
I like icons (and colors, but those are still mostly missing) to quickly find a frequent action. If the menu is always the same you can learn the position, but with dynamic entries it's way more difficult.
Other built-in Tahoe apps have more consistent indentations and far more icons. The Safari team (not the WebKit team, the people building the app wrapping it) just phoned it in with the menu icons. They also somehow disabled the Tahoe window opening animation.
Yes, just consistently line them up and it would be fine. There’s plenty of UX research saying icon+label improves recognition and task speed. NN Group is a good resource for this.
I think it used to just mean "singular", from the Latin grex, gregis meaning herd, and e/ex meaning "out of". It could mean singularly bad or singularly good I guess in English, but in Latin I think it had more of a connotation of exceptional, extraordinary, eminent.
I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.
If you're a fan of de-emphasizing your agency with the passive voice, then you can say "less could be cared for by me" or just "less could be cared for" if you totally want to totally avoid responsibility for not caring.
I loved MrHeather's comment (who worked with Weird Al to animate Word Crimes):
When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
As an immigrant to the US, I'm a fan of recognizing that there are cultures different from my own. But sometimes, when encountering unthinking US bigotry, it can be difficult to keep that in mind.
Have you ever traveled outside the US? I don't just mean to CS conferences, I mean really traveling.
Addendum: "I could care less" is a perfectly natural and recognizable idiom in some circles. To someone unfamiliar, it can seem strange, but that's true of many idioms.
The objections to it, though, fall broadly into two categories: ignorance, and bigotry. The former becomes the latter when someone refuses to recognize their ignorance, and doubles down on it.
I feel like shortcuts are often enough. They function quite like this: a symbolic language that allows you to build up an intuition. They use icons that you already know, and instead of being bespoke per designer (how many different save icons are there?) they work across your entire OS. The muscle memory you build, instead of being bespoke per menu (and dynamic in time), allows you to skip the menu entirely!
When only some things have icons, it's almost like a flag that these things are more special/useful/used. I think that is by far more useful than everything having an icon that you have to think about (or see the text next to it) to understand
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
It's pretty common that some things are more likely to be the things you are looking for than others. Drawing eyes to such things is helpful, whereas putting abstract monochrome line-art icons everywhere is not really helping anyone find anything.
Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.
The thoughtful inclusion and exclusion of icons in menu items builds hierarchy. When every item is special, none are. You've lost the ability to differentiate.
Icons everywhere is a hallmark to me of "webby" UI.
This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.
Every operator has:
Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move
Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"
Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"
Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'
RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans
Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode
Execution logic: the actual command code
Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:
Operators always have labels. Icons are optional.
Most menu items use no icon by default.
Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.
Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.
>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.
Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.
Before I read the blog post I would have agreed with you. It's pervasive, well understood, and the meaning is clear which you point out is what really matters.
But after reading the article I find myself asking if that's really true? I'm doubting it now. Certainly, the Floppy disk icon is clear to computer users who experienced at least a few years of the 90's or early 2000's. That's becoming less and less a percentage of computer users. For most users, that floppy disk has receded into being just a nonrepresentative shape associated to save.
I think it's that the blog post convinced me to reject nonrepresentative shapes as icons. You can't look at the extremely illustrative menu filled with icons that clearly describe window management actions or text formatting actions - where the icon itself conveys clearly, if abstractly, exactly how reality will look after you take the action - and tell me that a menu filled with random nonillustrative shapes has even a similar experience. I can't shake the idea that the menu icon needs to be more than just a logo or branding - it needs to be self-explaining.
The floppy disk did exactly the above when floppy disks were where the data was actually saved. But in 2025, we have to accept that it no longer illustrates anything. Today its just a nonrepresentative shape.
The human brain works with nonrepresentative shapes perfectly fine, otherwise companies wouldn't emphasize logos so much, often without even their actual name next to the logo.
Again, you don't even need to know what a floppy is or that it exists; its consistency and omnipresence, alongside the "Save" label most of the time, is enough to create meaning, such that most people will recognize it without the label.
I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.
The UI/UX design is not about standards and guidelines but about what the manager currently likes. There is no discipline because senior managers don't care until Excel cells turn red.
Steve Jobs was forcing design discipline across Apple products with furious determination because he actually cared.
That's how it ends, everything becomes an unmanageable, constantly changing mess because every manager likes something else and big firms are rotating their personnel every 3 years.
Because the above products of the same company are losing cohesion and consistency even if they are in the same product line which results in bad UX.
The Mythical Man-Month calls for a single person to be responsible for the design of a system. Steve Jobs was that guy for Apple. But once he left, there was no one strong enough to define the system across the whole company.
I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.
I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
This article made me realize why I always struggle to get through long documents generated by LLMs. The overuse of emojis doesn’t make it easier for me to find useful information, instead, it just adds a lot of noise.
Slightly off topic, or at least tangential, Zapier has one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces I have seen in a while. When you log in, they have a left hand toolbar that runs down vertically, and it is icon only. I understand why they do this, being on the left hand side you don't want to take up much space. But unlike other user interfaces that employ this type of toolbar, you CAN'T see what each item is by expanding the toolbar or even hovering over the item! The only way to see what each one is is to click on it. This is a pinnacle of terrible UX. I love Zapier, but it makes me question their product offering if they can get this so wrong.
Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
I wonder if part of the problem is the lack of color in these examples? I remember Microsoft Office 97 and 2000, which had icons in their menus (albeit only for a few actions, not for every action). However, those icons were colored and appeared visually distinct from each other.
Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icons for every item. Once again, though, every icon was in color.
And the loss of skeuoumorphism. As much as designers chide it, skeuoumorphic interfaces are, when done well, a massive improvement in usability compared to flat/monochrome ones, both for new and experienced users.
It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
Yesyesyes this here. Icons need colors, the smaller the more. Otherwise, they might as well be gray blobs. Peripheral vision works with colors, but it doesn’t do finer details.
rant:
But in the end, user interfaces are mostly “dead” anyway. No more structure, no more colors, no more icons. Everything is a flat sea of labels and boxes (or sometimes even just lines) floating(!) around. And no two user interfaces use the same style, even from the same vendor.
Maybe you misunderstood the author. They wrote: ‘It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.’
The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.
As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.
But isn’t the second half of the article the author pointing out a bunch of menu examples from macOS Tahoe where some items have icons and others don’t and still coming to the conclusion that it’s confusing? How is that not a contradiction of the prior declaration?
Yeah, that's a bit inconsistent. I think they are criticizing that it appears to be random which menu items have icons assigned, instead of (for example) giving all important or frequently used items an icon, or in some way that creates visual structure in the menu. Personally, what I find the most disconcerting in those examples is that the menu items aren't consistently inset.
Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag...
The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.
Aren't the icons for the different save actions typically different? The save as typically has some idea of editing, like a pencil or an editing box, save all has multiple save icons behind each other.
I wouldn't have an issue with every menu item having an icon, if we could make every single one different enough to be distinguishable from the others.
The problem is that you only have so many ways to draw the shapes and at your average resolution it ends up looking like "this group of squares with squiggles in them" and "this other group of circles with squiggles in them".
In some cases like a power menu or window snapping menu (like in the Mac Rectangle app) they can be insanely useful, though maybe those are easy to do because the count is kept to a reasonable amount. Maybe there are exceptions where the same icon can be used for multiple items, like in the insert/delete action groupings, to make the group distinguishable from the other options.
But in general, it just seems like the menus have perhaps too many items in them.
In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.
He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?
I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!
Call me crazy, but those icons are not different enough to be quickly readable. If the open and close icons on the elevator were distinct from one another words wouldn't be necessary, but the exact same icons rotated 180 degrees are indeciperable at a glance.
It takes noticeable processing time to know which is which. Especially with a button that you need to hit as quickly as possible to hold the door for someone, those icons should be widely different from one another. I can't count the number of times I've meant to hit the open button to hold the elevator for someone only to accidentally hit the close button just in time to make eye contact with the person we've left behind.
The open button looks like closed doors and the close button looks like open doors. I have to look at the symbols carefully and interpret the arrows every time. Or tell myself that the buttons do the opposite of what they look like at a glance. "open" and "close" would be easier.
I'm bracing myself for losing ellipses in Apple's menus too.
At least based on the trajectory of macOS's design decline.
For those who might not be aware, a long-standing design pattern on macOS is for menu item labels to have a "..." at the end when a click will take you somewhere, rather than taking immediate action. So you can click more confidently.
It's an example of the subtle quality and attention to detail you get with native UI, that gets lost when you build a web app and re-invent the wheel.
Most "web" UIs don't include this detail, as evidences by the screenshots in the article.
I have never known! On my web apps, I _try_ to give buttons that perform an irreversible action a different color, like saving, updating, creating, deleting etc
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time.
I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
I never noticed this but VS Code has almost no icons in menus. I'm fine with this though. We aren't supposed to use the menus all the time but rely on shortcuts or the command palette.
UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.
> "Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset. Interesting…again I wonder what the rationale is here? How do you choose? It’s not clear to me."
The rationale is clear, they are choosing to use icons only when a widely-recognized icon is available. This makes sense, and it answers the author's concerns perfectly about icons being used arbitrarily when they don't convey anything.
To be honest I find the whole motion of this blog post quite confusing. The user starts with a bad example, people using icons randomly that nobody could recognize without the text, which is evidence of the fact that the icon itself doesn't convey much information.
Then he shows an example where someone doesn't do the thing he complained about, they actually did use icons with a rationale. At which point he asks the question, "What is the rationale" but does not actually attempt to answer it..
To me though, there is a much more interesting paradox beneath all this. If we grant that it only makes sense to show an icon when it's meaning is widely known. How are new icons ever going to be introduced? Presumably every well known went through a period where it was used with text because it was still not well known. So while it might be bad UX to use an icon that is unfamiliar to users, over the long term using such icons has the benefit of creating a shared visual language that we all understand. I guess the litmus test for when to put an icon should then become: Is this functionality widespread enough in other applications that I can imagine this icon becoming standard in the future?
I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.
At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.
I really dislike how minimalism took over the world. The brain is pretty awesome and more information does not always equate to longer processing time. Sometimes more is simply more.
Personally, I don’t like to use icons in menus. I do like them in tab bars and toolbars. I’ve learned (the hard way) to be sparing about using icons. Way back in the 1990s, I designed a scanner driver plugin that used an almost purely iconic interface. Looked great. At the time, I was gaga over Kai’s Power Tools[0].
Our customers hated it, and it was quickly taken behind the woodshed, and buried in a shallow grave in the desert.
Icons are really difficult.
Designing icons is really hard. They need to be immediately recognizable, when very small, and also, retain coherence, when made very large. They need to be recognizable, when displayed as transparent, monochrome templates, and they need to be culturally relevant.
In some cases, there may be legal ramifications for icon choices. For example, branding. I remember someone complaining about Apple rejecting their app submission, because they changed the tint of the Sign in with Apple button to match their color theme.
Selecting from a set (like SF Symbols) takes a lot of thought. I have to be careful not to use one that is already a common icon for something other than the feature I’m attaching it to. I often see apps that make weird choices.
One of the apps I wrote, uses a “long press to learn more” feature. If you long-press on almost any item in a screen, you get a haptic, and a small popover appears, displaying the accessibility label and hint. Works nicely. Ensures that I have good accessibility support, doesn’t interfere with other gestures, and also forces me to be thoughtful about accessibility text.
Kind of a pain to implement and maintain, though. I don’t do it in most of my apps.
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
I used to notice and somewhat - but not solely - rely on icons, especially nice designed sets.
It seems though that a combination of samey-sameness (greyscale, shape, etc...) and the constant bombarding of attention-grabbing imagery (emoji, gif, ads...) has desensitised me from visual cues and I zero in on text instead now.
I think you're right. Desensitization has to be a big factor.
I'm certain that I just _like_ text, but I've also noticed recently that I miss very large attention-grabbing print (eg. "SALE" or "FREE WIDGETS JUST GIVE US YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS") as well. I think my brain has started flagging it as misleading noise along with the rest of the detritus.
I think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.
A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.
A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
It's extra noise because of the fad for samey B&W icons (instigated by the ease of implementing dark mode). With judicious use of color, there can be more visual distinction where the menus guide you to the intended target by visual memory without having to process the text.
I'd suggest a simple test: remix menu items and icons and test, if this has significant impact on usability. If not, the icons are just arbitrary decoration and ultimately add clutter.
Referring to the examples provided in the article, I'd suggest that the impact on the Safari app menu should be minimal (so these are non-functional icons), while the impact on the Move & Resize submenu would be devastating and should result in confusion (so these are essential).
If you can remix with minimal impact, don't do icons. (In the case of the app menu, these are apparently meant to add structure, which is already established by other means like menu separators, so you have now two – or, including indentation, three – systems of structure and visual hierarchy that are fighting each other.)
Moreover, if you put icons everywhere, you're forgoing the facility to convey state, like active state checkmarks, since these, instead of standing out and signalling change, would be just drowned in the decorative clutter. (So what's next? Add color and/or animation, like swirling checkmarks?) And this, BTW, is also why the icons in the Move & Resize menu are effective: they are conveying and illustrating state (in terms of a preview), while most of the other menu icons (mostly referring to activities) do not. So, as a rule of thumb: icons referring to state may be useful and even desirable, while icons referring to activities are probably better left out. (And, if you feel the need for something like bullet points to mark your most important menu items, there's probably a deeper problem with your menu structure.)
The first Google example is a nice one:
You could have only one icon for each group (one trash for all the 'delete' actions', one share icon for all the 'share / download' actions, etc).
That would be really helpful, for what it is worth.
Globally, I had a pleasant time reading this article which was way too dedicated to something that is almost invisible in its current state (ie: I don't notice those icons and surely think they aren't _that_ helpful for any type of user unless used in a rare way).
Maybe it's just me, but the icons are NOT noise or a distraction, they actually make it quicker and easier for me to find what I want. Yes, I can read the words, but sometimes things blend together, such as "unload tab" and "unpin tab". The icons make it easier to tell them apart. Also, again maybe just me, but I remember the icon for the action I want and it's much quicker for me to scan the menu to find the icon than to have to read every piece of text.
Anyway, lots of people don't like the removal of icons, me being one of them, and I think the icons are nice and should stay in the menus.
Maybe im a weirdo and maybe I'll get dowvoted...
But I only feel gratitude to the UI designers and the digital artists that they only think how to make it better for the user both in terms of creating a communication that uses less symbols per word and a more pleasent view for our eyes.
I also learned here that no matter your intentions and how much good you are going to do,and how many people like it, you always find someone not confortable (with his right point of view).
The fact that millions of users and millions of designers choose this style,for a long period of time now, it means that for most of them it make sense.
(Sometimes millions of users are screw up by bad designs, but usually is for a short period and by a handful of developers).
Things that consume energy and don't help life don't have a long life, that's what we learnt in biology.
I agree that there should not be icons in menus (with the exception of those indicating the status, like is shown in the 2005 guidelines). (Arrangements, shapes, etc might also sometimes be useful to indicate, but these should be separate from status indicators if they are present, and should be a part of the text instead in the few cases where they are applicable; in most cases they should not be needed.)
Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)
Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).
My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else.
But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here:
> You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, because good use of iconography doesn’t assign “arbitrary” icons to options, jt fields well-known icons that are easily recognizeable. Take for instance the ‘save’ icon - everybody knows what the floppy disc means, even if they have never seen, touched, or used a floppy disc IRL. A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.
They’re not arbitrary at this point - they’re standard.
I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:
> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.
I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.
You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.
Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.
From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."
Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
> Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item
> Not all menu items need an icon. Be careful when adding icons for custom menu items to avoid confusion with other existing actions, and don’t add icons just for the sake of ornamentation.
> Instead of adding individual icons for each action, or reusing the same icon for all of them, establish a common theme with the symbol for the first item and rely on the menu item text to keep the remaining items distinct
And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
Yes, the newer generation is used to computers being an inconsistent mess and slow. Only the the technically interested people know that it doesn't need to be this way. (And thus don't feed up with this and use Linux or *BSD :-) ).
yearning for old apple and order, current times and genz are more chaotic. not sure if it's generational, old apple was obsessed about design, now HIG is mostly optional. they now even use hamburger on websites which was a big no in the past.
This is what the Windows Vista/7-era UX guidelines say/said on on the matter:
Consider providing menu item icons for:
- The most commonly used menu items.
- Menu items whose icon is standard and well known.
- Menu items whose icon well illustrates what the command does.
If you use icons, don't feel obligated to provide them for all menu items. Cryptic icons aren't helpful, create visual clutter, and prevent users from focusing on the important menu items.
One thing that I think is demonstrated in the Safari "file" menu, the most common things you might need under that menu* have icons, which means you can scan to them very quickly.
* Note here that most common things you need under the menu are not the same as the most commonly used commands. New tab and new window are surely the most commonly used commands, but those you would almost never go to the menu for.
I don't know if it's something with me or with some larger population, but I find it very difficult/tedious/debilitating to navigate menu-lists with more than 5-6 items. If your menu is more than that (and in the examples its up to 20) I highly encourage anyone building a UI to add nice descriptive icons. Thank you.
This problem only shows that these corporations can't see beyond their own nose. Yes modern GTK is crap, but in GTK+ 2, there is a global per-user setting, whether you prefer only icons, icons and text or only text. All native applications respect it, because it is of course handled in the UI toolkit. I expect QT to be the same, this is typically even more configurable. QT and GTK+ also have interop for such settings.
I don't feel that this is clutter. It's actually helpful to quickly locate the spot you're looking for, or understand the purpose of something better without having to know exactly what it does. Listing text with separators and nothing else makes the experience worse unless it's already obvious where's-what.
In terms of accessibility, too, icons are a win. Colors on top of this also help with that.
In earlier versions of Apple OSes, you could edit the menus yourself, with the officially supplied resource file editor app and there was nothing really special about it.
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
The examples he showed, I didn’t mind. From the title, I thought he might be referring to the emojis in READMEs. Those annoy me and don’t add anything. (I assume all vibe-coded)
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
The general point holds - there is no universal solution, to some people some icons will be noise, to some the same icons will be instant visual parsing replacing reading, so the solution is obvious - easy user customization (ideally at an OS level where every single File-Open menu action can only be renamed/icon-added/removed / keyboard shortcut changed). But that's just a dream
I think the key in apples guidelines is the word arbitrary. A lot/ most of the icons in apples menus are purpose made for the menu item - so it’s not as big of an issue.
I think the best approach is to separate between frequent and rare actions. Frequent actions like cut, copy, and paste usually have recognizable icons that allow people to scan them easily when in need. Rare actions should use text only to prevent noise. Having an icon (which is most likely not as recognizable as the frequent actions) won't help
The real test would have been to use some software that the author uses frequently, and see if there's any decrease in speed when removing all the icons. I'm pretty sure, even when not pleasant, they work as heavy visual cues to find the item quicker.
Icons are also very useful if you're trying to use software in a language that you're learning, becoming the common language bridge.
I always took it as a plus for soft internationalization, e.g. we may not have translated or localized to the current user language, but icons area decent generic hint.
It's also very useful if you're dealing with both English and local language versions of the same software, as translations aren't always 1:1, but icons generally are.
putting aside accessibility, I believe that the usefulness of icons boils down to brain efficiency.
Considering that the brain has hard-wired neurons (since birth) to automatically count/recognize up to 3 objects, we need some icons as anchor points. With emphasis on some.
You can have max of 3 icons in a row, and a max distance of 6 items without icons.
Then you can VERY quickly find any menu item, by doing "+/-3 from X anchor" math, which your brain does extremely efficiently.
Further, this means that an action is represented by a relative path (e. g. save as = 1 down from the save icon). This further helps the brain to store these associations, because it's also extremely efficient at storing relative paths. So, long time users automatically become more and more efficient at using your software.
I like them, for whatever reason icons are a good thing for me.
I believe different people literally see the world different and there should be an option to remove icons if they prefer this way. It used to be this option at least in some programs.
But of course this person doesn't like it, and it wants everyone to follow his taste.
Back in the day MS office applications had toolbars (instead of ribbon)
Toolbars could be customized. You could select any item from any menu and place it on toolbar for quick access. So unique icons for every menu option were useful.
Even now i think MS office has a quick access toolbar on top that can be customized that way. Tad limited.
I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.
I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.
It has always been so since the dawn of modern desktops. I don’t see how/why this is noise. This is like a developer at a standup insisting we can make the app faster adding some micro services, flashy UX, and a few months of work while the - end user will still enter 20 order changes in an 8 hour day because that’s the environment.
There are so many reasons to add icons as many have already stated here. One reason i didnt see is for multi lang help. Sometimes the icon is enough when i dont know the language used.
However, i think what may be described here is that apps often deviate from a “universal” standard or reuse something to mean another. This defeats most of the benefits of using icons imo.
Very cool analysis, I never thought of that. I was actually in the camp of "icons everywhere" because it seemed inconsistent to have icons only sometimes, but I never stopped to look at indentation especially when mixing in checkmarks, thanks for sharing!
The disagreement here is interesting. I'm with OP, icons increase cognitive load for me if overused but can help a lot if there are just a few distinct ones.
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).
> What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).
> They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
Off topic but I could use some help here - what icon would you use for "prevent screen for sleeping" toggle button? I thought about an eye (open or closed if it's on or off), but I think there's a better option I can't see
I think that icons hold value so long as they have mostly distinct colors (which none of his examples do, so his point stands). At least for me, colors make vastly superior landmark than words do (once i know the interface).
This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.
They did say that "an icon is worth a thousand words" and that "people barely read text". Why is it helpful if you still need to read text? I understand that some icons are instantly recognizable, but these are really small and the black & white shapes look rather similar.
> ... Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text ...
Then they are wrong. And are bad UI designers following folklore instead of sound ergonomy.
I absolutely hate icons, and parsing and remembering them causes great cognitive load on me. Also, icons like to change with each revision of the apps, with styles etc., and are not uniform across apps. This makes them completely useless to me. Maybe I can cope with an '[X]' to close a window, but that's about it. Even very common functions like 'Save' or 'Add' usually have completely arbitrary and confusing icons. 'Add' is not a long text. It works. I need text. Without any icons. I want to switch icons off so that the text can have maximum space to be reasonably large to be seen and read easily.
People are different is what UI designers should know instead.
Ё-моё, this is really bad, I am so glad that I never upgraded to Tahoe.
Can we just stop endless design churn and resists urge to innovate in a fashion industry manner in software UI ? This is ridiculous.
And f. the product managers that pushing for this, f. the SIP, lets reverse engineer the crap out of this and reverse all this changes with easy to use system level patch.
i hope this is a fringe opinion as im usually putting icons on every item and found it leads to reduced mental overload and fast item selections, for complex menus i would even go so far as making it colored to more senses can be used. the icons have to be meaningful though, apples guidelines specifically mention arbitrary icons not icons at all
I hope so too, and I agree on the colored icons for pro apps. Mac user for 20 years, also using Windows on and off, and I've always liked the menu icons on Windows. A move away from minimalism that makes sense. The fact that they're not cargo-culting their 20 year old HIG is promising, really.
But they really should keep the indentations consistent, they're increasing cognitive load for no reason by not doing that.
I also like the hotkeys or whatever (the underlined letter in menu items and dialog box buttons), and maybe that is a fringe opinion among Apple users.
I want icons everywhere. They can literally be meaningless but it’s way way easier to find “2nd item in matching icon set” than it is to read every item in a list.
Looking at https://rectangleapp.com/, they basically use the same idea, yes, but is there a reasonable alternative?
Also, IMO, Apple’s pictograms look a lot better and are clearer. In Rectangle, the “left half” icon almost is a dark gray rectangle alongside a bright gray one, with the _dark_ indicating where tryout window will go. In Apple’s version, there is only one rectangle and the screen border is much easier to spot.
People at Apple is gonna read this and they will do a man-month’s worth of meetings but the designer and PM will never agree in whether to remove some or add more, the developers are too busy adding icons to other random places to get a promotion and the QA is filling about missing icons after finally getting around to check Tahoe.
People are saying they miss Steve Jobs but they probably just miss the product having actual direction.
If I remember Windows 95/98/XP correctly, these icons were in menus only if there was the same icon on the panel. This would let you see there's a shorter way to do the action.
Right now icons indeed just add clutter.
They also make you think how could the designer depict a concept.
For example, why should "Save" button look like a diskette. What if it was Jesus, like the Christ Redeemer statue. That actually could be a funny game, like in the post, to invent icons.
I think this is true, if you can read in the language.
Its really difficult to help someone on tech issues if their device is configured for a language you don't understand. Simply changing the language is annoying, b/c then they can't understand the workflow I'm showing them in their language.
If modern developers were able of accepting help, we wouldn't be in this bad situation in the first place.
I looked at the Safari screenshots. The entry text behind the icons is misaligned.
Menus in KDE show how it's done correctly, entry text is aligned on one vertical axis, then icons if present on another, then checkboxes if present on another. With opposite alignment, key shortcuts are aligned to one axis, then arrows disclosing submenus on another. (GTK gets that last part wrong.)
Thank you for writing this! Ever since Tahoe, I've felt EXACTLY the same... Just seems like the left hand not talking to the right hand at Apple, just another sign of failing leadership and lack of coordination between teams. Let's hope they fix this nonsense. Or at minimum, add a setting to disable this gratuity on menus.
My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.
The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.
Wow. Icons in Menus are so useful that I absolutely didn't expect this article is to complain about them. They help me location the item I'm trying to click tremendously.
Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?
Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake.
(It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first that started to lose their carefully collected UI expertise and replace it something that was original for the time, but that was all. E.g. I remember the very first ads after Jobs' comeback. They still had the beige Macintoshes, but their ads changed. Instead of a typical computer ad that showed a computer with a turned on screen and some desktop picture Apple's ads pictured turned off computers photographed from unusual angles or in unusual positions, like keyboard standing on its side leaning on the box, mouse hanging on its wire and so on. It was different, indeed, it stood out. Thing is, to always strive for that is harmful. Especially for user interface, where the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
So the rule of thumb is that: if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it.
One of first programs that put pictograms in menus was Microsoft Word. But the way Word did it was entirely different from what we do now. Microsoft Word had toolbars and their buttons, of course, were mostly pictorial. Toolbars could be turned on and off and users could assemble their own toolbars. Microsoft Word's menus displayed pictograms only for the commands that could also be called with currently visible toolbars. Have a toolbar visible? Its pictograms will appear in the menu. Closed that toolbar? The pictograms disappeared. The pictogram did not merely decorate a command, but also provided a hint that the user could call the command with a toolbar. This is informational. This is the right use.
Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform. It lets you skip reading all the text when you're familiar with a dialogue, and you can short circuit what you need to click on without having to read
That's the reason why pictographic additions are so useful. Its the reason why we distinguish different kinds of UI elements at all, because colour and graphics are incredibly powerful shortcuts for parsing information
This. If I'm out looking for a "Save" button, I'm going to pattern match "ancient disk icon" without even thinking about it.
It's also the reason why some menu entries get icons and others don't.
If the icon doesn't convey information by itself (like a "move to top" icon example), then it's there as a visual anchor - and you don't really need to have 4 of the same "delete" icon if a menu has 4 different "delete" options next to each other. Just one is enough of an anchor to draw your attention to the "delete group", and having just one keeps the visual noise low.
Likewise, you don't need visual anchors for every single option - just the commonly used ones, the ones you expect people to be looking for, and the ones that already have established pictography.
> "ancient disk icon"
Even though floppy disks were a bit before my time and I rarely ever used them, seeing them be called ancient disk makes me wanna find the nearest coffin and just go lie down. :D
What may be added is that some people have a hard time reading words by their 'total shape'. I can imagine that for them, the difference between pattern matching symbols and strings of letters is even more profound.
> Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform
No you can’t.
I'd disagree but either way throw another factor in: non-native speakers and cross-language usability.
If your software is in some language and you are looking at docs or a videotutorial or something in another language, it's often hard to translate specific terms, Icons don't change language. They also help if you have to do something in another machine that uses a different language for some reason.
Look at the traffic signs. You have very limited time to read the sign. That's the reason they have distinct patterns and rarely (except in USA) rely on blocks of text.
So do I want the button with the three horizontal lines, three horizontal dots, three vertical dots, nine dots arranged in a grid, the point-down triangle, or the point-right chevron? Generally these convey no information and I have to try each one to find the option I want. If it exists.
hamburger icon: originally, in older Android UI guidelines, provides access to a list of items that can be used to navigate between parts of a large UI. But at this point, pretty much evolved to mean "click to access a menu" on UIs that don't have a menu bar.
Three vertical dots: "More stuff that doesn't fit on a toolbar because the display on your current device isn't wide enough".
Three horizontal dots: click this item to access a dialog.
Point-down triangle: Select an value from a list.
There may be slight variations depending on the UI guidelines for the platform you are using (or designing for).
All enormously useful icons that provide specific context and meaning. I can't say that I've ever seen a piece of serious software that abuses those conventions.
> if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it.
If the text on the button is always the same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. Just use the position.
And if the position is always the same, it is decorative, and we'd pretty much rather discard it too and use time, which does not stay the same by definition, and make them stupids click anywhere spatially but on precise time: t % 2 == 0 => action 1, t % 3 == 0 => action 2 etc - but that would be too much of a disrespect towards users, however stupid - and we have no choice but randomize those iconless textless positions dynamically.
> thus is decorative. Discard it.
Or keep it since decoration makes interfaces feel more alive.
Not everything NEEDS to be useful
Classic Mac OS window headers had striped or dot patterns that were kind of similar to rugged parts of various physical tool handles. So they were both decorative in a way and informational: this is a part you can hold and drag around. A typical interface will have a lot of such parts that are both functional and decorative, so it will feel just right.
Purely decorative parts are also possible (and even desirable), but they should be personal. A set of colors chosen by the user, a background texture, a picture that the user keeps on the desktop and so on.
That’s a very subjective view of design, and I strongly disagree with it. I don’t want everything to be too uniform
Everything in a UI needs to not hinder usefulness. Adding more information signals (icons) which don't actually convey meaning is clutter that makes the UI harder to parse. That factor is far more important than whether it feels "alive".
Redundancy isn't a dirty word in Information Theory.
Menus should not feel alive. Because they are menus, at any given point they mostly contain things the user does not want to interact with right now. Menu icons that serve as visual anchors are good, they help the task of finding the desired action, as well as building a visual memory. Icons everywhere achieve the opposite, for the spurious benefit of visual consistency. Menu items are not consistent affordances, they perform very different actions that are at best related, but oftentimes they are there because they need to be somewhere.
A decorative element can be fine in a design model, but 1) a good design tends to have no purely decorative elements, and 2) it becomes problematic when the decorative element looks like a meaningful element but does not actually carry meaning (or the intended meaning).
We all recognise an icon in a menu as a meaningful element. Treating it as a decorative element is wrong and adds mental overhead, as we tend to scan every one of those icons (putting it at the beginning of menu text, i.e., to the left for LTR languages, makes it worse). It is well-known we do tend to scan these icons because that is the reason icons work: repeated exposure creates intuition. If this intuition is not put to use, then all such icons are a waste of our attention.
For example, a bullet in a list: fine (differentiates where each list item starts), window shadow or the 3D effect on window close buttons: fine (meaningful in terms if differentiating areas in the GUI, not pretending to do more); whitespace to set apart one thing more from another thing than from the third thing: fine (if that reflects the relationship between those things).
This is all somewhat simplified.
I tend to follow the "no form without function" design philosophy. Your comment makes me rethink that. thanks
You remind me of my favourite bit of Windows software ever[0]. It made the desktop feel really alive with things like can-can girls and humanoid fish flying around your "living wallpaper".
Then again it was named Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, so maybe it's not such a good idea for the default environment of a general-purpose operating system.
[0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/1975/monty-pythons-complete-w...
> Not everything NEEDS to be useful
... until the not-useful becomes distracting and/or causes information overload.
In the case of Apple, I've been a user of the Accessibility menu ever since they introduced the stupid parallax wiggling of the icons. Right now i use: reduce motion, bold text and reduce transparency. Because I want to see what I'm looking for when using the phone and not squint through pointless effects.
in that case, they should make it optional. What some might find as eye candy, other finds as nuisance (case in point, animation).
JetBrains products had colorful and useful pictograms on menu items and panels. One day they replaced them by B&W versions and it was fail. Few years later they introduced purple icons. For promoting some internal AI companion.
The pictogram is there for people who can't read English, to help them get by.
It's the same reason why Ikea's instruction manuals typically have no words.
> Their purpose is to convey information in limited space.
No, that's only one of their purposes. Another one is faster visual parsing of shape recognition instead of reading even if space is not an issue (just like with all of these menus, they waste so much space on padding they could fit command names 3 more times)
Right; but this is also information. The Civilization game used little pictures of wheat and shields, I think, to indicate the production levels. Here the pictures are better than numbers because they feel more like actual things and allow to express all the details we need. We understand smaller numbers differently, three vs five is not just arithmetical for us, it is more substantial to actually see three vs five items than a different shape of a digit.
Yes, and as much as I hate to defend modern UI designers, I believe the icons in the menus here are actually extremely helpful (even when duplicated).
In the first example, when I want to find the option to add or delete a row in this massive menu, the icons clearly convey the purpose. I can instantly filter a huge list of possibilities down to a few relevant entries.
yes; I think it depends a lot on how accepted the icon is. Every few months when I have to open ST's CubeProgrammer, my brain substantially deteriorates because they don't use text and the icons for their main tabs are not always understandable to me. (and the thing's otherwise a relic from 20+ years ago)
X, volume & mute icon, disk icon, upload/download icon -- these are all fine and good; you don't need to spell those out for me because their use is so widespread that even if I didn't know what they meant, it'd be very useful to learn. I have no idea what a generic "integrated circuit" icon means, though, and I doubt anyone will use it elsewhere to mean the same thing, so I just click around randomly until I find what I'm looking for, like I'd do with the previously-unlabeled 6-switch panel in my living room where the positioning of the switches have no obvious relation to the physical placement of the ceiling lights.
I think Apple's menu actually shows exactly what I want and expect; show icons if it'll help me, don't show them if they wouldn't; though in come cases, I think Apple could apply some more icons (like for "Stop", there are a few good choices for that).
Nothing more addictive than adding more padding
I disagree, pictures are easier to remember than words and I'm much faster (several hundred miliseconds) at quickly spotting an icon in the 12th place down a list and clicking it because I memorized it visually than reading the actual words.
So icons make power users faster. It's not "clutter". Your argument about "don't use it for aesthetics" is ironic because you're making it because of aesthetics. For me it's about user speed.
>I'm much faster at quickly spotting an icon
Using the label-less example in the article with the 10x10 monochrome icons I doubt many other people feel the same.
> 10x10 monochrome icons
I don't mind the size, but lack of colors is annoying. If common icons where color-coded, like green to save, blue to download/print/export, red to delete, UI would be friendlier to use.
> If common icons where color-coded... UI would be friendlier to use
As a colour-blind person, this sounds like accessibility hell. Don't forget your UIs still need to be friendly in what amounts to monochrome
I think it is important to stress that both, color _and_ shape should be visible distinctive, and as you say it is important that the color palette is chosen in a way that even if the color does not stand out for a the color-blind person, the contrast stays visible.
Making everything monochrome is surly not more accessible, because there sure are people who find it easier to distinguish by color than shape.
And also in some cultural contexts in which red and green do not carry the same meanings.
Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them? Icons have until recently always been color coded. That doesn't make them a problem for the color-blind. You can look at the shape of the icons and read the text next to them. Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded? Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
> Why in the world would colors discomfort you if you can't discern between them?
Because pretty much as soon as one starts colour coding items in the UI, people start using the specific colours to encode meaning. If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon in your UI twice, congrats, you just lost 8% of male users!
> Would a pedestrian traffic light be better if it wasn't color coded?
If they weren't colour-coded, they would have to be differentiated by shape, and then when I traveled to Canada, I wouldn't have to guess whether the fancy horizontal traffic lights are ordered left-to-right or right-to-left
> Would a white car be preferable to a red car?
Even fully colour-sighted folks can't see red very well at night, so yes, white car > red car
Personal anecdote re the traffic lights: I thought "green light" was a metaphor until sometime my twenties, when a friend explained that the 3rd light actually is green to other people. It's always been a white light to me
With that line of reasoning we arrive at the conclusion that all graphical elements of an interface should be removed, as the blind cannot see icons.
> If your UI requires someone to discern between the red and green versions of the same icon
Color coding has never been about this, only when implemented wrongly. It is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.
> Color coding... is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.
In principle, I agree, but I do not believe I have ever used a software package that follows this philosophy. In practice, once you give people a tool, they are inclined to use it, and most projects only try and address accessibility concerns post-ship
Monochrome is a strange complaint, the text is also monochrome. Regarding what most people think I don't know, I'm definitely faster at spotting a specific pictogram in the start of a line than having to read multiple lower information-density pictograms (alphabet characters) in order (reading a full word or sentence). This seems obvious to me, 1 thing is faster to parse than multiple things.
The monotone ones in Windows 11 that jump around in order or menu position (I think both of these have been addressed in 24h2 or something?) where they hop to the top or bottom of the menu or dont show so the order is wrong if they are disabled for some object are insanely bad UX.
I say this because I agree, the pictogram icon is much easier for me to find. I also like having a word there though, if they change the picture on me. If its not color, almost all bets are off, since I dont even look at the icon, just look for a color and go for it if thats available.
There was a point where a significant amount of menus in windows and office used only icons. It made it basically unusable for anyone over 60.
an icon for "save" will suffice to help me find the portion of the menu with "save as", "save a copy", and "export". when all four have the same icon, or slight variations, i'm back to reading each one to discern the difference.
Speak for yourself. I remember words. That disk icon stands for "Save". "Save" is what I remember. I also remember location, but the spatial component applies independent from icons or words.
> Speak for yourself
>> I'm much faster
Limited space seems like a surprising thing to lean on, especially when put next to a text label, with the increase pixel count/resolution on devices over the last 5-10-15 years.
Words create better beginners than icons alone.
UI/UX can evolve as the baseline digital literacy of users evolves usually very slowly, to remain maximally inclusive.
One thing that I'd consider is start with text labels, and the more they are used, start showing an icon. Just hold a left bar for them to start appearing so that learning can happen.
The screenshot where there was only some menu items with icons feels more memorable for that reason.
I hate the monotone ones - I get it, its easy to tick the box that they are colorblind safe or whatever, and its modern design, but man the colors really help me identify what the hell I'm going at in the menu. Brown thingy (clipboard) is copy, black square is save. I'm a simple creature.
Same. Most people identify a blob of color far earlier than they distinguish one monochrome shape from another.
> the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
Agreed. It just doesn’t sell.
From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.
Also, I disagree with:
> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”
Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:
> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?
That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.
I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.
I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).
We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:
1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.
I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.
If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)
Sounds like me: 1. For new UI/tool, I depend on text to navigate. 2. Once I'm more familiar, I scan using icons first then text to confirm. 3. With enough time, I use just icons. 4. Why the ** do they keep moving it/changing the icons?
> Those that use interface items with icons
This is the bane of my existence since icons aren't standardized* and the vast majority of people suck at designing intuitive ones. (*there are ISO standard symbols but most designers are too "good" to use them)
Cite cliché about the only intuitive user interface is the nipple; everything else is learned.
Having done my share of UI work, my value system transitioned from esthetics to practicalities. Such as "can you describe it?" Because siloed UI, independent of docs, training and tech supp, is awful.
All validated by usability testing, natch. It's hard to maintain strong opinions UI after users shred your best efforts. Humilitating.
Having said all that... If stock icons work (with target user base), I'm all for using them.
PS I do have one strong opinion: less is more.
Hooray, actual user research and data!! This is what I tell all my clients: "We can speculate all day long, but we don't have to. The users will tell us the correct answer in about 5 minutes."
It's amazing that even in a space like this, of ostensibly highly analytical folks, people still get caught up arguing over things that can be settled immediately with just a little evidence.
After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.
What isn't so helpful though is the classic Google Sheets example where it has three different options (Delete Row, Delete Column, etc.) but all with an identical "trashcan" icon.
I immediately see that block as something to do with deleting stuff. If I don't need deleting is ski if i need i look closer
Can you associate the symbols shown in the post with the text blurred out to their individual meaning?
Genuinely curious if the item types in as shown in the article are that helpful though. They seem small, fiddly, hard to distinguish between, and not especially intuitive.
did not undergo a stroke, but I find myself often navigating menu by memorizing the location in the menu, I also use the icons for memorizing and then I can speed up by not reading.
The first time I noticed that is the time I needed to operate a Finnish Windows machine and I could get it working pretty good by sheer memory
Then I'd argue that not having icons on every item in the menu, and having groups/separators helps more than just having nearly indistinguishable icons everywhere
maybe, but over use of groups can also be confusing
I find icons helpful to visually anchor things in the menu. It can be noisy when there are 5 identical "paste as" icons but generally I see it as a positive
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
There's illiteracy, and there's functional illiteracy. They're not the same, and people often confuse the two. A literally illiterate person (ha!) wouldn't make headway with almost any realistic computer interface, icons or not.
The 20% statistic is about people who have great trouble reading and comprehending simple sentences, not discerning individual words. It's tragic and debilitating, but such people could muddle through a simple interface with textual labels. A truly illiterate person couldn't.
Is this just your belief presented as fact, or do you have some data to back this up?
(Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").
Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p
Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)
Watch a small child use a computer.
I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).
Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.
Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.
But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.
But also from an accessibility stand point, providing users with affordances to remove distractions (animations, transitions, and yes, icons) should be an option. But I disagree with the author that the default should be less icons.
I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.
I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.
Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!
This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
I still regard Office '97 as the best UI it ever had. I spent a lot of time inside it, including a couple of years at a bank reconciling corporate actions before I got my first programming job. The ribbon version was awful in comparison.
2003 was the best/final iteration of it - I still miss old excel
new excel is just garbage instead in virtually every way
Yeah, after that they started nuking VBA too. Sad times!
I believe some programs used to let you even drag menu items to the toolbar.
Many KDE apps (Dolphin, Kate, Okular, etc.) let you configure their tool bars (or get rid of them entirely) and set them to show just icons, text, or both (with the text to the side or below). It's the kind of thing most people won't bother with, but for frequently used applications it's nice to be able to customize it to suit your needs. It's done via a config option though, not by dragging menu items to the toolbar (which strikes me as something you could initiate by mistake).
MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.
…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.
I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
You made me feel old by saying "I believe".
I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.
I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.
It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all.
The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have common shared menu items over the OS or they change their placement throughout the app.
> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.
In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)
It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.
The IKEA instructions are generally regarded as a triumph of simplicity. Yet on more than one occasion I've come across cases where a few words in a call out would have prevented having to redo some step after later realising that some features had to be oriented a particular way - the pictures not quite conveying their intention until it was obvious in hindsight.
Others have brought up the Office 97 style for good reason. Everything has an icon, on an icon toolbar. Every command can also be on a file menu but most of them there don’t have an icon. The ones that do are special or intended to draw your attention.
And there’s a consistent metaphor: for example the web browser is represented by a globe for the world wide web. So the “hyperlink” function is a globe with a chain. This the “preview as web page” is a globe with a magnifying glass (whereas the print preview command is a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.).
This icon language hints at function through its form and helps serve as a cue, a reminder, or a visual representation of its function.
And it all worked on 640x480 256 color screens. They are thoughtful and useful. These plain flat uninformative icons are just rude.
Sure. There are also icons that are plain flat and don't use metaphor and work great. Play, share, hamburger, bluetooth, power... i am sure there are more. Icons are more about familiarity than anything.
I assume you were very familiar with Office 97. I can tell you people born in 97 are probably not. High chance they might not like and understand the icons because they aren't familiar with them.
It's like when everybody wants to design logo as unforgettable as Nike. But in reality anything people see 20 times a day people will remember.
> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
I wrote it in a different comment elsewhere: this is exactly why you don't want icons on every menu item. When everything tries to be stand out, nothing does. It's much easier to distinguish groups and "it's the third item below the icon" than "out of these identical looking icons one of them points to a menu item that does what I want".
Sure! I agree. My comment above probably seems like i think this new Apple design direction is good. I don't. Tahoe seems like amateur hour.
What i was mainly saying is that the icon does not have to describe the label for it to be effective. That doesn't mean that usage/quality of the icon suddenly doesn't matter.
Similar is the save icon, though for a different reason. It conveys its function well, but one first needs to know what a floppy disk even is!
Nah, people especially younger ones associate the floppy disk with the save button
A lot of apps people use these days are cloud-first and automatically save all the time, so there's not even a save button to have a floppy icon for! The icon to say that it's synced looks like a cloud, and if you're using a web browser it'll probably have a Download button with a download icon. No floppy disks in sight.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's computer users out there that wouldn't recognise the "save icon".
RIP in peace
I disagree. Not all it's "autosave on cloud", and some apps keeps having an explicit save something button or option.
I recently had a discussion about replacing the "save icon" (IE. the old floppy disk icon) for an icon with an arrow pointing down, for a button that saves (don't download!) a custom query of the user in the system. Perhaps it could be replaced with another icon, but not by someone that everyone would think is "Download".
they think it's a soda vending machine
My daughter understood what the Chrome icon was for before she could even spell ‘Chrome’.
My biggest design peeve of the examples posted is the inconsistent indentation of each section of the menu. Where if any single item in the section has an icon it gets indented, but if none do it doesn't, and seeing them next to each other is jarring. I feel this is especially inconsistent design because if a menu item has a check mark it indents all menu items in the whole menu. I would have thought Apple would have the taste to keep things more consistent across the whole menu than that, as it seems sloppy.
I imagine Steve Jobs would've asked to see whoever designed those menues, picked up their laptop and thrown it out the window...
That would indeed be the myth. The reality is what you see on the screen
Hard for Steve Jobs to have done this for the changes of the last ~14 years...
but trivial for all the similar changes before that while the laptops were still flying out
You’ve never seen the movie Poltergeist?
There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on?
One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. This is the same problem AWS has. Their dashboard is just noise, because the icons are neither visually distinct nor descriptive of the project.
I've also seen some of this same problem with card and board games as well. You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it, all the icons are big enough that people can make them out sitting upside down in front of the person across the table from them, even if they're over 40.
His first example, Google Sheets, does well by this metric IMO, but the next few are kinda bad.
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes.
No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box.
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html
The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines.
https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/
Frankly it's senseless.
https://www.flarup.email/p/through-the-liquid-glass
Insane but still working legacy workaround:
https://simonbs.dev/posts/how-to-bring-back-oddly-shaped-app...
…
macOS isn't fun anymore.
First we lost the pinstripes, then brushed aluminium; then we lost colors in the sidebar icons. Then they made everything flat.
Finally we lost the background and legibility.
Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve.
We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.
Surprised it took me this far down to see him mentioned.
Never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss Jobs.
MacOS was never fun. I've been using MacOS at work for five years and it's never been fun nor intuitive. I always explained this to myself "that's because I grew up with Windows" but three months ago I switched to KDE on my private machine and it's miles ahead of MacOS. Just a week ago I got a new company Macbook and the UX is even clunkier than before. Shit just doesn't work.
I feel like the older versions had much more of a personality. OS 8-9, OS X (10.0-10.9). Once they (and Windows) started with flat design (which was over 10 years ago!) everything just converged and now all UIs look very similar to each other. MacOS Big Sur and Tahoe look quite similar to various 3rd party KDE and Gnome skins that predate them.
> macOS isn't fun anymore.
It was always closed source. That hasn’t changed. That should be a hint.
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done.
> One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability.
I have this issue with Google apps on my phone. Once they decided that all icons should have the same four blurred colors with low contrast, you just can't tell which app you're looking at without the text label below. And I'm not visually impaired.
The trend towards monochrome, unhinted (blurry) icons certainly doesn’t help.
Yeah and the Amazon color schemes aren't exactly amazing for contrast either.
ironically the new Amazon visual identity has plenty of contrast
> You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it […]
This is something visual artists usually learn and are good at and it's not primarily for accessibility, it's simply good design. Accessibility improves as a side effect.
I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
But someone got lazy and all the "Delete" or "Add" icons are identical... There's probably a ticket somewhere to "improve the icons" being ignored..
But that's the point. The icons help you find the "delete" section.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
Agreed, compare that to Quit Safari and Force Quit Safari below. One is X in a square, the other is X in a circle. Very confusing.
No. It's laziness and bad design. It's the most generic trash icon from the most generic icon set.
Same with "add row above/below" or the completely distinct action Create Filter/Filter by cell value.
They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought. Especially given the fact that these actions have been around in office software for literal decades, and more often than not with their own distinct icons.
I don't know how they can be trivially improved.
I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.
So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?
> It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to.
No. No, there's no good reason. Google is institutionally incapable of making good designs. Forget good, they can't make sensible designs.
So they whipped out the most generic icon set. Typed "delete" or "add" or "filter" and chose the first icon that popped up for all actions.
Top to bottom:
- Insert column before. left arrow, column (three stacked squares), green plus sign
- Insert row after: green plus sign (in the same position as previous item), row (three squares in a row), arrow down
- Insert cells. Doesn't need an icon, since it's already in the obvious insert group. Or: a single square, green plus sign
-------
- Delete column: column, red cross
- Delete row: row, red cross
- Delete cells: doesn't need an icon. Or: single square, red cross
--------
- Create a filter. Same filter icon with a green plus. This one is so obvious, that only a moron could think it's hard, or there's some reason they didn't do it.
- Filter by cell value. Same icon, or better still a square with filter because there are other filters elsewhere.
---
And that's before we actually ask people to think about the designs: https://www.flaticon.com/packs/tables-82 or https://www.flaticon.com/packs/spreadsheet or https://www.flaticon.com/packs/ecommerce-266
You don't need to use language like "moron". It doesn't help the conversation and it's not appropriate. Trying to convince people you are right because you think other people are less intelligent is generally not a strategy that works.
And yes, all of the icons you are describing and linked to can be drawn. I even described these types of combinations myself. The point you're missing is that they are nearly impossible to visually distinguish at a quick glance. When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid. They're difficult to decipher. You have to stop and think about what they actually mean and hope you don't make a mistake.
I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for. They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it. Which is why it's a feature, not a bug, even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action. At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted. Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon is bad design because it makes it slower to figure out the right item, not faster.
Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs. These trade-offs are the kinds of things you learn when you study design, and a huge part of graphic design is getting the trade-offs right in a given context.
> I even described these types of combinations myself.
Not exactly. Re-read what I wrote
> When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid.
1. It was just an example, out of potentially thousands of possible variations. And I described a much simpler one
2. You're complaining about "variations of a grid" and at the same time praise how Google uses literally the same icon for completely different actions
> I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for.
So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it.
> They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it... even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action.
Ah yes, you don't have to think about checks notes that "Create filter" and "Apply filter from cell value" are actually completely different actions with completely different modes of operation, that's why they get a single generic filter icon.
> At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted.
Oh, "read text between identical icons and hope you didn't misread the action you needed" is good, but "read text between similar icons if they are not distinct enough" is bad. Got you
> Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon
So don't cram it. I literally described the most minimal icons that don't cram much info.
Also, there's literally no "crammin of info" in, say, adding a plus sign to a filter icon to designate "create" and to differentiate it from "apply".
Just a few examples of minimal icons. They are from different packs, so their styles and approaches will be different, these are just to illustrate the idea. Also, as you said, not every menu item needs an icon:
- "insert column": https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/edit-tool_7601880?related... and https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/edit-tool_7601881?related...
- "insert row": https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/row_7043663?related_id=70...
- delete can follow the same principle
- create filter can use the same pattern as this remove filter icon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/clear-filter_6134093?rela...
etc. etc.
Google "designers" literally took a generic icon set, searched for terms "insert", "delete", "filter" and chose the first ones that came up in search. That's it. That's the "hard decision" they had to make.
Which is ironic given that they went out of their way to create varied distinct icons for the top-level menu, but not for the context menu. Or that Google Docs (not Sheets) manages to do all that, and use slightly different icons than Sheets (e.g. for Paste Without Formatting)
> Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs.
What Google shows is not a trade-off. It's either incompetence or non-caring, and I don't know which is worse.
I don't know what to tell you.
You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon, and it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
Good luck with your own UX!
> You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon
Tell me you didn't read what I wrote without telling me that.
Literal quote: "So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it."
The rest of my text is showing how your defense of "let's use a generic icon for completely different actions for every menu item" falls apart even with the tiniest of scrutinies
> it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
Literally every menu in every Google Docs is full with unique icons for every menu item except this context menu BTW.
You'd know that if you weren't so hellbent on defending incompetence.
Same here. I view the text labels as a more detailed description I can read if I don’t understand the icon at first glance. The icons help with decreasing time spent searching for the option I want. Not having to read every single menu item saves some number of milliseconds which adds up over time and reduces cognitive load.
All of the Google Docs icons are really thoughtfully designed, with distinctive silhouettes. Instead of making 5 tiny illegible variations on inserting a row/column/etc, they just use the + symbol. Because the symbol is the same, your eye is then drawn to the differing text on the right.
Some of the Apple ones really are ridiculous, like the ones around window management and copy/pasting. Even blown up to fullscreen size, you wouldn't have a chance of guessing what they do. But at display size, they are just plain illegible. Having them there is just a visual distraction.
> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.
They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
Flat, monochrome icons might look nice, but they are only useful if used sparingly.
If you're going to use many icons, then they need to be visually distinctive. That means ditching the flat designs, and embracing colour again.
Color icons needs to done twice - once for light mode and again for dark mode.
It is the reason for removing colors and shadings from all icons.
Think about what was lost in the quest for dark mode versus the benefits.
I would argue that menu icons are more useful than dark mode in several situations.
We don't need light mode and dark mode if we just set our monitor brightness correctly.
It seems some monitors now assume dark mode - only the very lowest brightness setting isn't blinding.
So in your opinion, monochrome icons are a sign of laziness, rather than an aesthetic choice. Got it.
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
Those icons were well-designed for the newly computerized office employee of the day. The new school of icons are made by graphic designers for other graphic designers.
How can you remember the underlined "i" when it's so tiny and also positioned in random places? These should be in their own column just like a checkmark or an icon (but yes, no single key navigation is way worse than bad icons)
I like the idea of placing the hotkeys in a column of their own. Nevertheless, even if the underlined i is sometimes hard to notice, I only need to find it until I've memorized it.
Not sure I agree. It's much easier for me to find the link icon than "Insert Link" in the Google Docs example. It's seem pretty close to a standard icon so, for me at least, it's helpful to find it. Same wit some of the others like increase indent, decrease indent, left, right, center justification, and lots of others.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
With apologies to our American friends, Jeremy Clarkson had a take on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7kXUbwngB4
Somewhere in there, I think he does have a point.
Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.
I've heard this kind of reasoning from a number of designers, and it strikes me as post hoc justification for aesthetic self-indulgence.
So, with the greatest of respect, I don't believe you. It does not take you "a couple more milliseconds to scan", since a couple of milliseconds is well below human perceptible thresholds for almost every sense.
There is no accessibility improvement here — you just like the consistency.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18465408/
I do like how in some MacOS examples we see icons for some of the more important or commonly used menu items, but not the others in the same list. The absence of icons has meaning ("it's likely not what you want")
If you have an icon next to every entry and they all look the same on first glance, you don't have visual anchors.
I think visual signs are an amazing way to impart immediate information at a glance. Take road signs for example, at speed I can know what to expect around the corner.
However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.
Its the same in the GUI. The symbols should allow me to move quicker around the interface, even if I've not used the software before.
The issues I see are each OS/App can, and does, use their own symbols for the same functionality (sure there are some universals like cut/copy/paste). And like the article these symbols now appear to be getting used as bullet points, so each item needs it's bullet points.
In my opinion, and like the greyed out keyboard shortcuts over to the right of some menu items, these symbols should only be there when they denote actions that can be done by clicking a button. They should be imparting the mouse equivalent or those keyboard shortcuts, a way to navigate and do actions; not as some decoration. Imparting the language of the GUI.
So yeah I agree with the article. Function over design aesthetic every time.
> However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.
A lot of countries seem to standardise on similar signs. I have not had a difficulty driving in different countries and visiting more.
Cars are even more standardised. The controls vary very little.
There is a definitely problem with GUIs and the problem seems to be aesthetics and branding trump function.
Even cut copy paste are not used consistently.
In many AI chatbots ..i see the "paste" icon used for the function of "copy"
I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links.
There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.
It's kind of a shame how we keep trying to make icons look uniform, either in color, or in shape.
Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors.
Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almost completely illegible since we've taken away all the things that help set icons apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi...
Yeah, I learned that using Netscape 6 with a row of blue balls for icons; going from the older Mozilla builds with the Netscape 4-style icons it was a definite downgrade. Pheonix had a row of orange balls; they later switched to IE-style icons with distinct shapes, which was better.
The recent Android releases where everything is a squircle really sucks too.
Google has been universally panned for using their logos as app icons. I think most people in this thread are talking about UI vs app icons (essentially avatars for apps at this point).
Visually uniformity is a broad trend that affects both areas. The monochrome line-art UI icons that are used everywhere are every bit as bad as Google's app icons.
Here are some icons I screenshotted off a website. I challenge you to tell me what they mean
http://www.marginalia.nu/junk/icons.png
http://www.marginalia.nu/junk/icons2.png
Hint: „ǝsıɹdɹǝʇuǝ ʎɹʇ„ sı dn oʇ ƃuıʇuıod ʍoɹɹɐ ǝɥʇ puɐ „sǝsıɹdɹǝʇuǝ„ sı ǝqoʃƃ ǝɥ⊥
This.
I like icons (and colors, but those are still mostly missing) to quickly find a frequent action. If the menu is always the same you can learn the position, but with dynamic entries it's way more difficult.
+1. I love icons, just be consistent. That MacOS example is egregious
Other built-in Tahoe apps have more consistent indentations and far more icons. The Safari team (not the WebKit team, the people building the app wrapping it) just phoned it in with the menu icons. They also somehow disabled the Tahoe window opening animation.
Yes, just consistently line them up and it would be fine. There’s plenty of UX research saying icon+label improves recognition and task speed. NN Group is a good resource for this.
In my language “egregious” means “very good”. In English means both very good and very bad. What’s your meaning here? Just to be consistent :)
In practice, "egregious" in English never means very good
This hasn't been my experience.
It used to!
I think it used to just mean "singular", from the Latin grex, gregis meaning herd, and e/ex meaning "out of". It could mean singularly bad or singularly good I guess in English, but in Latin I think it had more of a connotation of exceptional, extraordinary, eminent.
Literally. Oh wait, I mean not literally?
Arguably.
I could care less!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457
https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarretthe...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-le...
I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.
If you're a fan of de-emphasizing your agency with the passive voice, then you can say "less could be cared for by me" or just "less could be cared for" if you totally want to totally avoid responsibility for not caring.
I loved MrHeather's comment (who worked with Weird Al to animate Word Crimes):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823632
MrHeather on April 9, 2020 | parent | next [–]
When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
As an immigrant to the US, I'm a fan of recognizing that there are cultures different from my own. But sometimes, when encountering unthinking US bigotry, it can be difficult to keep that in mind.
Have you ever traveled outside the US? I don't just mean to CS conferences, I mean really traveling.
Addendum: "I could care less" is a perfectly natural and recognizable idiom in some circles. To someone unfamiliar, it can seem strange, but that's true of many idioms.
The objections to it, though, fall broadly into two categories: ignorance, and bigotry. The former becomes the latter when someone refuses to recognize their ignorance, and doubles down on it.
I feel like shortcuts are often enough. They function quite like this: a symbolic language that allows you to build up an intuition. They use icons that you already know, and instead of being bespoke per designer (how many different save icons are there?) they work across your entire OS. The muscle memory you build, instead of being bespoke per menu (and dynamic in time), allows you to skip the menu entirely!
Exactly. Reading a line of text is a lot slower than recognizing an icon. Those icons are for power users who are really familiar with the app.
This is true when you know what you're looking for, the icons are distinct and you have good eyesight.
When only some things have icons, it's almost like a flag that these things are more special/useful/used. I think that is by far more useful than everything having an icon that you have to think about (or see the text next to it) to understand
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
It's pretty common that some things are more likely to be the things you are looking for than others. Drawing eyes to such things is helpful, whereas putting abstract monochrome line-art icons everywhere is not really helping anyone find anything.
Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.
This has been my take too.
The thoughtful inclusion and exclusion of icons in menu items builds hierarchy. When every item is special, none are. You've lost the ability to differentiate.
Icons everywhere is a hallmark to me of "webby" UI.
This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.
Every operator has:
Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move
Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"
Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"
Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'
RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans
Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode
Execution logic: the actual command code
Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:
Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.
Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.
>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.
Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.
FWIW: Apple’s SF Symbols font doesn’t have an image of a floppy disk, nor does it have an icon meaning “save”.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.
Before I read the blog post I would have agreed with you. It's pervasive, well understood, and the meaning is clear which you point out is what really matters.
But after reading the article I find myself asking if that's really true? I'm doubting it now. Certainly, the Floppy disk icon is clear to computer users who experienced at least a few years of the 90's or early 2000's. That's becoming less and less a percentage of computer users. For most users, that floppy disk has receded into being just a nonrepresentative shape associated to save.
I think it's that the blog post convinced me to reject nonrepresentative shapes as icons. You can't look at the extremely illustrative menu filled with icons that clearly describe window management actions or text formatting actions - where the icon itself conveys clearly, if abstractly, exactly how reality will look after you take the action - and tell me that a menu filled with random nonillustrative shapes has even a similar experience. I can't shake the idea that the menu icon needs to be more than just a logo or branding - it needs to be self-explaining.
The floppy disk did exactly the above when floppy disks were where the data was actually saved. But in 2025, we have to accept that it no longer illustrates anything. Today its just a nonrepresentative shape.
The human brain works with nonrepresentative shapes perfectly fine, otherwise companies wouldn't emphasize logos so much, often without even their actual name next to the logo.
Again, you don't even need to know what a floppy is or that it exists; its consistency and omnipresence, alongside the "Save" label most of the time, is enough to create meaning, such that most people will recognize it without the label.
I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.
The UI/UX design is not about standards and guidelines but about what the manager currently likes. There is no discipline because senior managers don't care until Excel cells turn red.
Steve Jobs was forcing design discipline across Apple products with furious determination because he actually cared.
That's how it ends, everything becomes an unmanageable, constantly changing mess because every manager likes something else and big firms are rotating their personnel every 3 years.
Because the above products of the same company are losing cohesion and consistency even if they are in the same product line which results in bad UX.
Design departments are not disciplined enough...
The Mythical Man-Month calls for a single person to be responsible for the design of a system. Steve Jobs was that guy for Apple. But once he left, there was no one strong enough to define the system across the whole company.
I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.
I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
This article made me realize why I always struggle to get through long documents generated by LLMs. The overuse of emojis doesn’t make it easier for me to find useful information, instead, it just adds a lot of noise.
Slightly off topic, or at least tangential, Zapier has one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces I have seen in a while. When you log in, they have a left hand toolbar that runs down vertically, and it is icon only. I understand why they do this, being on the left hand side you don't want to take up much space. But unlike other user interfaces that employ this type of toolbar, you CAN'T see what each item is by expanding the toolbar or even hovering over the item! The only way to see what each one is is to click on it. This is a pinnacle of terrible UX. I love Zapier, but it makes me question their product offering if they can get this so wrong.
Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
Easy customisation / sharing is the gate to heavens out of that hell, but the lid on the designer' pot is too thick so the don't even notice
I wonder if part of the problem is the lack of color in these examples? I remember Microsoft Office 97 and 2000, which had icons in their menus (albeit only for a few actions, not for every action). However, those icons were colored and appeared visually distinct from each other.
Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icons for every item. Once again, though, every icon was in color.
And the loss of skeuoumorphism. As much as designers chide it, skeuoumorphic interfaces are, when done well, a massive improvement in usability compared to flat/monochrome ones, both for new and experienced users.
It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
Yesyesyes this here. Icons need colors, the smaller the more. Otherwise, they might as well be gray blobs. Peripheral vision works with colors, but it doesn’t do finer details.
rant:
But in the end, user interfaces are mostly “dead” anyway. No more structure, no more colors, no more icons. Everything is a flat sea of labels and boxes (or sometimes even just lines) floating(!) around. And no two user interfaces use the same style, even from the same vendor.
/rant
Isn't the Apple Menu basically a start menu though?
Written words don't have colour, and you can parse those with ease.
Unless you don't know the language well, then icons are very helpful.
100% disagree. They make finding a group of commands very quickly and it's not like horizontal space in menu is at the premium
Maybe you misunderstood the author. They wrote: ‘It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.’
The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.
As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.
But isn’t the second half of the article the author pointing out a bunch of menu examples from macOS Tahoe where some items have icons and others don’t and still coming to the conclusion that it’s confusing? How is that not a contradiction of the prior declaration?
Yeah, that's a bit inconsistent. I think they are criticizing that it appears to be random which menu items have icons assigned, instead of (for example) giving all important or frequently used items an icon, or in some way that creates visual structure in the menu. Personally, what I find the most disconcerting in those examples is that the menu items aren't consistently inset.
Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag... The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.
Aren't the icons for the different save actions typically different? The save as typically has some idea of editing, like a pencil or an editing box, save all has multiple save icons behind each other.
First thing I found: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/step-/gtk-stock-icons2/ref... See the last row.
I wouldn't have an issue with every menu item having an icon, if we could make every single one different enough to be distinguishable from the others.
The problem is that you only have so many ways to draw the shapes and at your average resolution it ends up looking like "this group of squares with squiggles in them" and "this other group of circles with squiggles in them".
In some cases like a power menu or window snapping menu (like in the Mac Rectangle app) they can be insanely useful, though maybe those are easy to do because the count is kept to a reasonable amount. Maybe there are exceptions where the same icon can be used for multiple items, like in the insert/delete action groupings, to make the group distinguishable from the other options.
But in general, it just seems like the menus have perhaps too many items in them.
In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.
He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?
I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!
Call me crazy, but those icons are not different enough to be quickly readable. If the open and close icons on the elevator were distinct from one another words wouldn't be necessary, but the exact same icons rotated 180 degrees are indeciperable at a glance.
It takes noticeable processing time to know which is which. Especially with a button that you need to hit as quickly as possible to hold the door for someone, those icons should be widely different from one another. I can't count the number of times I've meant to hit the open button to hold the elevator for someone only to accidentally hit the close button just in time to make eye contact with the person we've left behind.
The open button looks like closed doors and the close button looks like open doors. I have to look at the symbols carefully and interpret the arrows every time. Or tell myself that the buttons do the opposite of what they look like at a glance. "open" and "close" would be easier.
I'm bracing myself for losing ellipses in Apple's menus too.
At least based on the trajectory of macOS's design decline.
For those who might not be aware, a long-standing design pattern on macOS is for menu item labels to have a "..." at the end when a click will take you somewhere, rather than taking immediate action. So you can click more confidently.
It's an example of the subtle quality and attention to detail you get with native UI, that gets lost when you build a web app and re-invent the wheel.
Most "web" UIs don't include this detail, as evidences by the screenshots in the article.
I have never known! On my web apps, I _try_ to give buttons that perform an irreversible action a different color, like saving, updating, creating, deleting etc
I use outline buttons for "link" buttons and colored-in ones for those that perform actions.
Former UI guy at Google here.
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
There are other reasons too but that's a big one.
You don’t have to have icons for every menu item for this to work though. One copy icon is enough for the whole block.
Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time. I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
I never noticed this but VS Code has almost no icons in menus. I'm fine with this though. We aren't supposed to use the menus all the time but rely on shortcuts or the command palette.
Perhaps the solution is to split the menu up instead of giving you a long, tedious menu that is unparseable without even more visual noise of icons.
UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.
> "Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset. Interesting…again I wonder what the rationale is here? How do you choose? It’s not clear to me."
The rationale is clear, they are choosing to use icons only when a widely-recognized icon is available. This makes sense, and it answers the author's concerns perfectly about icons being used arbitrarily when they don't convey anything.
To be honest I find the whole motion of this blog post quite confusing. The user starts with a bad example, people using icons randomly that nobody could recognize without the text, which is evidence of the fact that the icon itself doesn't convey much information.
Then he shows an example where someone doesn't do the thing he complained about, they actually did use icons with a rationale. At which point he asks the question, "What is the rationale" but does not actually attempt to answer it..
To me though, there is a much more interesting paradox beneath all this. If we grant that it only makes sense to show an icon when it's meaning is widely known. How are new icons ever going to be introduced? Presumably every well known went through a period where it was used with text because it was still not well known. So while it might be bad UX to use an icon that is unfamiliar to users, over the long term using such icons has the benefit of creating a shared visual language that we all understand. I guess the litmus test for when to put an icon should then become: Is this functionality widespread enough in other applications that I can imagine this icon becoming standard in the future?
I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.
At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.
I really dislike how minimalism took over the world. The brain is pretty awesome and more information does not always equate to longer processing time. Sometimes more is simply more.
Personally, I don’t like to use icons in menus. I do like them in tab bars and toolbars. I’ve learned (the hard way) to be sparing about using icons. Way back in the 1990s, I designed a scanner driver plugin that used an almost purely iconic interface. Looked great. At the time, I was gaga over Kai’s Power Tools[0].
Our customers hated it, and it was quickly taken behind the woodshed, and buried in a shallow grave in the desert.
Icons are really difficult.
Designing icons is really hard. They need to be immediately recognizable, when very small, and also, retain coherence, when made very large. They need to be recognizable, when displayed as transparent, monochrome templates, and they need to be culturally relevant.
In some cases, there may be legal ramifications for icon choices. For example, branding. I remember someone complaining about Apple rejecting their app submission, because they changed the tint of the Sign in with Apple button to match their color theme.
Selecting from a set (like SF Symbols) takes a lot of thought. I have to be careful not to use one that is already a common icon for something other than the feature I’m attaching it to. I often see apps that make weird choices.
One of the apps I wrote, uses a “long press to learn more” feature. If you long-press on almost any item in a screen, you get a haptic, and a small popover appears, displaying the accessibility label and hint. Works nicely. Ensures that I have good accessibility support, doesn’t interfere with other gestures, and also forces me to be thoughtful about accessibility text.
Kind of a pain to implement and maintain, though. I don’t do it in most of my apps.
[0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
No idea why I'm like this.
I used to notice and somewhat - but not solely - rely on icons, especially nice designed sets.
It seems though that a combination of samey-sameness (greyscale, shape, etc...) and the constant bombarding of attention-grabbing imagery (emoji, gif, ads...) has desensitised me from visual cues and I zero in on text instead now.
I think you're right. Desensitization has to be a big factor.
I'm certain that I just _like_ text, but I've also noticed recently that I miss very large attention-grabbing print (eg. "SALE" or "FREE WIDGETS JUST GIVE US YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS") as well. I think my brain has started flagging it as misleading noise along with the rest of the detritus.
I think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.
A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.
A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
Two extensions/patches I'd like to see for macOS:
1. Remove all icons from menus.
2. Make mouse-over do nothing - I should be able to move the mouse anywhere on the screen, and nothing should change colour/pop out etc.
It's extra noise because of the fad for samey B&W icons (instigated by the ease of implementing dark mode). With judicious use of color, there can be more visual distinction where the menus guide you to the intended target by visual memory without having to process the text.
I'd suggest a simple test: remix menu items and icons and test, if this has significant impact on usability. If not, the icons are just arbitrary decoration and ultimately add clutter.
Referring to the examples provided in the article, I'd suggest that the impact on the Safari app menu should be minimal (so these are non-functional icons), while the impact on the Move & Resize submenu would be devastating and should result in confusion (so these are essential).
If you can remix with minimal impact, don't do icons. (In the case of the app menu, these are apparently meant to add structure, which is already established by other means like menu separators, so you have now two – or, including indentation, three – systems of structure and visual hierarchy that are fighting each other.)
Moreover, if you put icons everywhere, you're forgoing the facility to convey state, like active state checkmarks, since these, instead of standing out and signalling change, would be just drowned in the decorative clutter. (So what's next? Add color and/or animation, like swirling checkmarks?) And this, BTW, is also why the icons in the Move & Resize menu are effective: they are conveying and illustrating state (in terms of a preview), while most of the other menu icons (mostly referring to activities) do not. So, as a rule of thumb: icons referring to state may be useful and even desirable, while icons referring to activities are probably better left out. (And, if you feel the need for something like bullet points to mark your most important menu items, there's probably a deeper problem with your menu structure.)
The first Google example is a nice one: You could have only one icon for each group (one trash for all the 'delete' actions', one share icon for all the 'share / download' actions, etc). That would be really helpful, for what it is worth.
Globally, I had a pleasant time reading this article which was way too dedicated to something that is almost invisible in its current state (ie: I don't notice those icons and surely think they aren't _that_ helpful for any type of user unless used in a rare way).
Yes menu item group icons would be a much better anchor: third icon under such and such icon
I don't understand why removing menu icons is a good thing. Firefox did it and I absolutely hate the change: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2021/06/content-design-considera...
I actually use Zen browser and thankfully someone made a "mod" to bring them back: https://github.com/SivanTechDev/zen-themes/tree/main/BringBa...
Maybe it's just me, but the icons are NOT noise or a distraction, they actually make it quicker and easier for me to find what I want. Yes, I can read the words, but sometimes things blend together, such as "unload tab" and "unpin tab". The icons make it easier to tell them apart. Also, again maybe just me, but I remember the icon for the action I want and it's much quicker for me to scan the menu to find the icon than to have to read every piece of text.
Anyway, lots of people don't like the removal of icons, me being one of them, and I think the icons are nice and should stay in the menus.
Agreed, icons make it way faster to scan menu items, also hate that Firefox removed them. I'm constantly searching for the correct entry.
Maybe im a weirdo and maybe I'll get dowvoted... But I only feel gratitude to the UI designers and the digital artists that they only think how to make it better for the user both in terms of creating a communication that uses less symbols per word and a more pleasent view for our eyes.
I also learned here that no matter your intentions and how much good you are going to do,and how many people like it, you always find someone not confortable (with his right point of view).
The fact that millions of users and millions of designers choose this style,for a long period of time now, it means that for most of them it make sense.
(Sometimes millions of users are screw up by bad designs, but usually is for a short period and by a handful of developers).
Things that consume energy and don't help life don't have a long life, that's what we learnt in biology.
On mobile, there's a small menu to different site sections at the bottom of the screen. You'll never guess what that menu includes.
I agree that there should not be icons in menus (with the exception of those indicating the status, like is shown in the 2005 guidelines). (Arrangements, shapes, etc might also sometimes be useful to indicate, but these should be separate from status indicators if they are present, and should be a part of the text instead in the few cases where they are applicable; in most cases they should not be needed.)
Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)
Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).
My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else.
But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here:
> You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, because good use of iconography doesn’t assign “arbitrary” icons to options, jt fields well-known icons that are easily recognizeable. Take for instance the ‘save’ icon - everybody knows what the floppy disc means, even if they have never seen, touched, or used a floppy disc IRL. A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.
They’re not arbitrary at this point - they’re standard.
> A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.
Ok, but not by intuition. This is learned pattern recognition, which started with seeing those icons adjacent to text labels.
I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:
> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.
I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.
You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.
Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.
From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."
Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
Icons in menus do follow the 2025 HIG: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
The link you attached still contains these:
> Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item
> Not all menu items need an icon. Be careful when adding icons for custom menu items to avoid confusion with other existing actions, and don’t add icons just for the sake of ornamentation.
> Instead of adding individual icons for each action, or reusing the same icon for all of them, establish a common theme with the symbol for the first item and rely on the menu item text to keep the remaining items distinct
And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
2020 was linked in another thread here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...
I think the problem might be generational… the only people who know - or care - about the HIG are older millennials
Yes, the newer generation is used to computers being an inconsistent mess and slow. Only the the technically interested people know that it doesn't need to be this way. (And thus don't feed up with this and use Linux or *BSD :-) ).
yearning for old apple and order, current times and genz are more chaotic. not sure if it's generational, old apple was obsessed about design, now HIG is mostly optional. they now even use hamburger on websites which was a big no in the past.
HIGs change. what made sense for people who first used computers in their 30s might not make sense for people which used them since 7
I think you’re underestimating how many people grew up with GUIs 30-40 years ago.
This is what the Windows Vista/7-era UX guidelines say/said on on the matter:
Consider providing menu item icons for:
- The most commonly used menu items.
- Menu items whose icon is standard and well known.
- Menu items whose icon well illustrates what the command does.
If you use icons, don't feel obligated to provide them for all menu items. Cryptic icons aren't helpful, create visual clutter, and prevent users from focusing on the important menu items.
From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-...
>For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why?
Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.
One thing that I think is demonstrated in the Safari "file" menu, the most common things you might need under that menu* have icons, which means you can scan to them very quickly.
* Note here that most common things you need under the menu are not the same as the most commonly used commands. New tab and new window are surely the most commonly used commands, but those you would almost never go to the menu for.
Interesting take. As a low vision person, the icons help me scan menus like this.
I don't know if it's something with me or with some larger population, but I find it very difficult/tedious/debilitating to navigate menu-lists with more than 5-6 items. If your menu is more than that (and in the examples its up to 20) I highly encourage anyone building a UI to add nice descriptive icons. Thank you.
This problem only shows that these corporations can't see beyond their own nose. Yes modern GTK is crap, but in GTK+ 2, there is a global per-user setting, whether you prefer only icons, icons and text or only text. All native applications respect it, because it is of course handled in the UI toolkit. I expect QT to be the same, this is typically even more configurable. QT and GTK+ also have interop for such settings.
I don't feel that this is clutter. It's actually helpful to quickly locate the spot you're looking for, or understand the purpose of something better without having to know exactly what it does. Listing text with separators and nothing else makes the experience worse unless it's already obvious where's-what.
In terms of accessibility, too, icons are a win. Colors on top of this also help with that.
In earlier versions of Apple OSes, you could edit the menus yourself, with the officially supplied resource file editor app and there was nothing really special about it.
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
Sad, really...
The examples he showed, I didn’t mind. From the title, I thought he might be referring to the emojis in READMEs. Those annoy me and don’t add anything. (I assume all vibe-coded)
> (I assume all vibe-coded)
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
The general point holds - there is no universal solution, to some people some icons will be noise, to some the same icons will be instant visual parsing replacing reading, so the solution is obvious - easy user customization (ideally at an OS level where every single File-Open menu action can only be renamed/icon-added/removed / keyboard shortcut changed). But that's just a dream
I think the key in apples guidelines is the word arbitrary. A lot/ most of the icons in apples menus are purpose made for the menu item - so it’s not as big of an issue.
I certainly try to add icons some places assuming it is faster that way.
Having said that most of the time I discover ... there's not a great icon and it's not faster / I just don't.
I find these kinds of decisions pretty dang hard really.
They are fast to find. It's functional to have something rather than nothing there.
I think the best approach is to separate between frequent and rare actions. Frequent actions like cut, copy, and paste usually have recognizable icons that allow people to scan them easily when in need. Rare actions should use text only to prevent noise. Having an icon (which is most likely not as recognizable as the frequent actions) won't help
The real test would have been to use some software that the author uses frequently, and see if there's any decrease in speed when removing all the icons. I'm pretty sure, even when not pleasant, they work as heavy visual cues to find the item quicker.
Icons are also very useful if you're trying to use software in a language that you're learning, becoming the common language bridge.
I always took it as a plus for soft internationalization, e.g. we may not have translated or localized to the current user language, but icons area decent generic hint.
It's also very useful if you're dealing with both English and local language versions of the same software, as translations aren't always 1:1, but icons generally are.
putting aside accessibility, I believe that the usefulness of icons boils down to brain efficiency.
Considering that the brain has hard-wired neurons (since birth) to automatically count/recognize up to 3 objects, we need some icons as anchor points. With emphasis on some.
You can have max of 3 icons in a row, and a max distance of 6 items without icons.
Then you can VERY quickly find any menu item, by doing "+/-3 from X anchor" math, which your brain does extremely efficiently.
Further, this means that an action is represented by a relative path (e. g. save as = 1 down from the save icon). This further helps the brain to store these associations, because it's also extremely efficient at storing relative paths. So, long time users automatically become more and more efficient at using your software.
I like them, for whatever reason icons are a good thing for me.
I believe different people literally see the world different and there should be an option to remove icons if they prefer this way. It used to be this option at least in some programs.
But of course this person doesn't like it, and it wants everyone to follow his taste.
You're lucky they still have text labels!
Back in the day MS office applications had toolbars (instead of ribbon)
Toolbars could be customized. You could select any item from any menu and place it on toolbar for quick access. So unique icons for every menu option were useful.
Even now i think MS office has a quick access toolbar on top that can be customized that way. Tad limited.
I agree with this. Consistency > immediate design beauty
I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.
I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.
Seems like something that could be a UI setting per user.
Only text/Only icons/Only icons (with tooltips)/Some icons with text
Exists in GTK+ as a OS per-user setting, I expect in KDE also.
It has always been so since the dawn of modern desktops. I don’t see how/why this is noise. This is like a developer at a standup insisting we can make the app faster adding some micro services, flashy UX, and a few months of work while the - end user will still enter 20 order changes in an 8 hour day because that’s the environment.
What will you gain from removing the icons?
There are so many reasons to add icons as many have already stated here. One reason i didnt see is for multi lang help. Sometimes the icon is enough when i dont know the language used.
However, i think what may be described here is that apps often deviate from a “universal” standard or reuse something to mean another. This defeats most of the benefits of using icons imo.
Very cool analysis, I never thought of that. I was actually in the camp of "icons everywhere" because it seemed inconsistent to have icons only sometimes, but I never stopped to look at indentation especially when mixing in checkmarks, thanks for sharing!
The disagreement here is interesting. I'm with OP, icons increase cognitive load for me if overused but can help a lot if there are just a few distinct ones.
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).
Somewhat tangential:
> What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).
> They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”
2005?? Guidelines evolve.
Here's from 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
They sure do, and just like biological evolution it is not a principled process. Sometimes evolution results in a worse outcome.
Though styles and capabilities have changed, the same basic principles apply when using a mouse pointer and keyboard.
Off topic but I could use some help here - what icon would you use for "prevent screen for sleeping" toggle button? I thought about an eye (open or closed if it's on or off), but I think there's a better option I can't see
Cup of coffee
I have sent them one of these
https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/565/565524.png
I love it for quickly finding items.
I think that icons hold value so long as they have mostly distinct colors (which none of his examples do, so his point stands). At least for me, colors make vastly superior landmark than words do (once i know the interface).
Don't agree with this take - it's quick to scan for the delete icon.
This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.
Without text can you 100% decipher what each icon in this dropdown menu means and which one you need to pick for the action?
https://imgur.com/a/sTycBjc
They didn't say to have no text, they just said icons are still helpful.
They did say that "an icon is worth a thousand words" and that "people barely read text". Why is it helpful if you still need to read text? I understand that some icons are instantly recognizable, but these are really small and the black & white shapes look rather similar.
> ... Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text ...
Then they are wrong. And are bad UI designers following folklore instead of sound ergonomy.
I absolutely hate icons, and parsing and remembering them causes great cognitive load on me. Also, icons like to change with each revision of the apps, with styles etc., and are not uniform across apps. This makes them completely useless to me. Maybe I can cope with an '[X]' to close a window, but that's about it. Even very common functions like 'Save' or 'Add' usually have completely arbitrary and confusing icons. 'Add' is not a long text. It works. I need text. Without any icons. I want to switch icons off so that the text can have maximum space to be reasonably large to be seen and read easily.
People are different is what UI designers should know instead.
Windows 95 really was peak UI.
IIRC that standard was to put the toolbar icon next to any menu item that was also a toolbar button. Otherwise, don't put one.
Ё-моё, this is really bad, I am so glad that I never upgraded to Tahoe.
Can we just stop endless design churn and resists urge to innovate in a fashion industry manner in software UI ? This is ridiculous.
And f. the product managers that pushing for this, f. the SIP, lets reverse engineer the crap out of this and reverse all this changes with easy to use system level patch.
mixed bag of reactions :
- the part where the reader is invited to guess what a menu item does based on the icon alone was very interesting
- how come the floppy disk survived as as "save" icon when floppy disk use is not the default save medium ?
- has there been any global study (dis)proving that icons and emojis are truly understood and carry the same meaning everywhere on the planet ?
Designers insist on "consistency", meaning if something applies in one place, it must apply in every place.
This is misguided.
Probably this should be configurable, so people who want icons only or text only or both can make that choice. I like that KDE makes that possible.
This blog post was written by someone who speaks/reads english as a first language.
i hope this is a fringe opinion as im usually putting icons on every item and found it leads to reduced mental overload and fast item selections, for complex menus i would even go so far as making it colored to more senses can be used. the icons have to be meaningful though, apples guidelines specifically mention arbitrary icons not icons at all
I hope so too, and I agree on the colored icons for pro apps. Mac user for 20 years, also using Windows on and off, and I've always liked the menu icons on Windows. A move away from minimalism that makes sense. The fact that they're not cargo-culting their 20 year old HIG is promising, really.
But they really should keep the indentations consistent, they're increasing cognitive load for no reason by not doing that.
I also like the hotkeys or whatever (the underlined letter in menu items and dialog box buttons), and maybe that is a fringe opinion among Apple users.
I want icons everywhere. They can literally be meaningless but it’s way way easier to find “2nd item in matching icon set” than it is to read every item in a list.
His example of great icons from Finder is stolen directly from the Rectangle app. Looks like Apple shamelessly took Rectangle's icons.
Looking at https://rectangleapp.com/, they basically use the same idea, yes, but is there a reasonable alternative?
Also, IMO, Apple’s pictograms look a lot better and are clearer. In Rectangle, the “left half” icon almost is a dark gray rectangle alongside a bright gray one, with the _dark_ indicating where tryout window will go. In Apple’s version, there is only one rectangle and the screen border is much easier to spot.
Emojis in comments, terminal logs, git commits, documentations, everywhere… Send help
People at Apple is gonna read this and they will do a man-month’s worth of meetings but the designer and PM will never agree in whether to remove some or add more, the developers are too busy adding icons to other random places to get a promotion and the QA is filling about missing icons after finally getting around to check Tahoe.
People are saying they miss Steve Jobs but they probably just miss the product having actual direction.
Do we even need menus? They are good for feature discovery, but could be replaced by a search!?
Disagree entirely, pictographs are easier to recognize than text descriptions of features and functions.
My best guess for the sparse icons in older MacOS versions: icons only for frequently-used menu items.
If I remember Windows 95/98/XP correctly, these icons were in menus only if there was the same icon on the panel. This would let you see there's a shorter way to do the action.
Right now icons indeed just add clutter.
They also make you think how could the designer depict a concept.
For example, why should "Save" button look like a diskette. What if it was Jesus, like the Christ Redeemer statue. That actually could be a funny game, like in the post, to invent icons.
Perhaps we are witnessing a early shift toward ideographic writing
Even worse, Windows now has menus with only icons and no text.
I think this is true, if you can read in the language.
Its really difficult to help someone on tech issues if their device is configured for a language you don't understand. Simply changing the language is annoying, b/c then they can't understand the workflow I'm showing them in their language.
> Send help.
If modern developers were able of accepting help, we wouldn't be in this bad situation in the first place.
I looked at the Safari screenshots. The entry text behind the icons is misaligned.
Menus in KDE show how it's done correctly, entry text is aligned on one vertical axis, then icons if present on another, then checkboxes if present on another. With opposite alignment, key shortcuts are aligned to one axis, then arrows disclosing submenus on another. (GTK gets that last part wrong.)
Look how they massacred my boy
Thank you for writing this! Ever since Tahoe, I've felt EXACTLY the same... Just seems like the left hand not talking to the right hand at Apple, just another sign of failing leadership and lack of coordination between teams. Let's hope they fix this nonsense. Or at minimum, add a setting to disable this gratuity on menus.
Hilarious: I looked at first two examples on the page, showing a menu and contextual menu, and I saw no problem. Icons? What icons?
That's when I realized that, much like advertisements on a web page, my brain had utterly filtered them out.
My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.
The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.
Wow. Icons in Menus are so useful that I absolutely didn't expect this article is to complain about them. They help me location the item I'm trying to click tremendously.
Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?
Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me.
Deal with it.
I like them
I like it.
[flagged]
Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Enough.