Icons are everywhere these days. Every site, every app, every interface, every blog and every forum you look at – you either see or read about them. Or Both.
There’s flat icons, round icons, long shadow icons, line icons, icon fonts, hyper-realistic icons, svg icons, animated icons, glyph icons, and lest we forget the all-important social media icon. Practically every designer on Dribbble has designed a set of icons. On top of that, we’re now seeing the concept of cloud typography being ported over to icons through the ‘start-up trend’ in a select few’s attempt to make a quick buck.
Originally, icons were used in interface design as a sense of virtual metaphor to help bring intuitiveness and intrinsic meaning to tasks and GUI in general. The classic example being the original “desktop” metaphor of folders, files, trash can, calculator, spread-sheets, web pages etc.. one that’s still used today.
Of course, when used in moderation, there’s nothing wrong with icons. Infact testing has suggested that usability and recognition can actually improve when icons and text are combined, as apposed to just text or just an icon.
In theory, this works. So you say “Icons are awesome. They look great and improve usability, testing proved it. I’ll keep using them like crazy, because I’m an awesome designer.” However, testing like this (and a lot of in-depth interface testing) is often obsolete and something you can’t base a website or app design from. So you design, test and iterate right? Well unfortunately not every project budget can justify the cost of comprehensive usability testing or a UX designer.
“I know, let’s use tooltips!” says the UX designer at Gmail, “Good Idea. Then we can make a sleek interface covered in icons, hide all the important stuff, look minimalist as hell and get praised for being the slickest UX designers around. Because, hey, we work at Google!” says another.
I’m no UX expert, and I won’t pretend to be, however It’s important to understand that as designers, there’s nothing stopping us from reading up about UX and learning – something I’ve done my fair share of. Like I said, If you do a lot of design work from design to development (like me), It’s important to understand UX fundamentals. Tooltips may have there benefits, in that it allows a user to focus on using an app without being bombarded with options, however they seem more of a solution to a problem that was created by an over-enthusiastically minimalist designer who decided icons look ‘better’ by themselves.
Using any interface with tooltips is like pulling teeth. The idea is that after repeated use, the user learns the meanings of the icons by hovering and through ‘learning’ functionality becomes ‘intuitive’ making the tooltip redundant. The result is the opposite. Instead the user learns to use the tooltip to find out what the icon is on an ad-hoc basis – with the logic that it’s quicker and easier than the effort required to remember/learn the icons’ function or location.
While I don’t have a whole bunch of Google research to prove this, I’m sure it sounds familiar to a lot of you reading this. Luckily tooltips were a relatively short-lived trend and never really took off in web design. Having said that, Google’s reluctance to part ways with them is still a mystery to me.
So enough about tooltips, we know they suck right? Let’s get down to the icons themselves. The problem is that many designers (and some clients) want icons for everything – every task, every button, every function and every menu. Does “Could we put an icon there?” sound familiar?
Icons are especially bad for abstract purposes and actions. Here’s an example. How many times have you used Mircosoft Word in the past 10 years? Can you remember the icons for ‘Highlight’ or “Text Color”? I didn’t think so.
Similarly, icons are particularly bad for actions. It’s hard to clearly show a process with a picture. There doesn’t need to be an icon for everything. After all text and writing was developed due to ambiguity and illegibility concerns of pictographic writing.
The truth is, the humble icon was once a sign of prestige, designed by artists to improve usability. Something of significance, dignity, importance and most of all benefit.
It would be nice to see icons treated with a bit more dignity in a way that reflects what they once were just a few short decades ago.
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