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!
#/media/File:Minims_(palaeography).jpg){kind=link}
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.