(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.)

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 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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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-...

Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.

* 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.

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...

In terms of accessibility, too, icons are a win. Colors on top of this also help with that.

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 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.

What will you gain from removing the icons?

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.

Only text/Only icons/Only icons (with tooltips)/Some icons with text

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

2005?? Guidelines evolve.

https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/565/565524.png

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.

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.

- 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 ?

This is misguided.

People are saying they miss Steve Jobs but they probably just miss the product having actual direction.

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.

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.

That's when I realized that, much like advertisements on a web page, my brain had utterly filtered them out.

Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?

Deal with it.