We’ve talked about just how bad Apple’s regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They’ve gotten so, so much worse.
In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.
But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.
And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.
↫ Nikita Prokopov
The number of detailed examples in this article are heartbreaking. I just don’t understand how anyone can look at even three of these and not immediately ring the alarm bells, slam the emergency brake, rush to Tim Cook’s office. It further illustrates that no, the problem at Apple is not just one man, whether he be Jonathan Ive or Alan Dye or the next unfortunate bloke on the chopping block, but the institution as a whole. I have a feeling the kind of people who care about proper UI design have all left Apple by now. The institutional knowledge is gone.
And that kind of knowledge is extremely difficult to get back.
I disagree with Nikita, or at least their points won’t work for me. I primarily depend on color rather shape alone to distinguish icons, so I find the “flat” and monochromatic trend in design of the last 15 years or so tends to create designs that are borderline unusable. To me Windows Vista/7’s icons and the Oxygen icon scheme from KDE 4 were nearly perfect, I use Oxygen in KDE 6 today. I remember when Microsoft described their inspiration in Windows 8 to be signs in airports, but I struggle with those, and it has only gotten worse for me. I often see only a bunch of indistinguishable monochromatic shapes that only close looks and eventual muscle memory resolve.
I agree that the monochrome examples are unusable. But if Apple had bothered to color these icons, and use those colors consistently, some of the problems would go away.
I agree, colors are very helpful for visual memory. There’s a reason we evolved to see colors and software/operating systems that don’t make good use of them result in icon sets that are harder to differentiate. I’m looking at the icon tray in KDE and the monochrome icons require more effort to identify than the color icons in the taskbar, which are more immediately recognizable because more information is being conveyed through color.
> I agree, colors are very helpful for visual memory.
sure, but if your desktop becomes a colorful mess of shiny icons, you’ll be in the same situation as with monochrome. Colors attract attention, pictograms pass on information. At least until our writing system changes from symbols to colored dots.
I remember in the early 00s, the system tray was full of variously colored icons. Never could find anything there.
> I’m looking at the icon tray in KDE and the monochrome icons require more effort to identify than the color icons in the taskbar
Until you get unlucky, and mostly run programs with green icons.
I love the monochrome tray: it doesn’t attract attention until I try finding* something there. And then there’s colourful Gajim, which stands out like a sore spot.
*yes, finding, not glance and click. In agreement with your argument about immediate identification.
Serafean,
I understand things can become chaotic, but I would not say it’s because of color icons. I’m looking at desktops side by side and color icons are only a positive for me. They clearly make icon identification easier without making the UI messier IMHO. The real chaos may be the number of apps spamming the icon tray, not that they were in color; removing color doesn’t fix the problem. If they had been monochrome it would have been even worse.
I’m looking at at VLC, FF, blender, tiger vnc, all shades of orange, but there’s still hues and shades of colors that make it easy to spot even peripherally – something I can’t do with monochrome. Our visual senses are naturally evolved to sense colors and monochrome interfaces/icons are throwing this advantage away.
I get it, some people like to tone down colors to match their aesthetic preferences. However we need to talk about form versus function. Icons can be done tastefully IMHO and really there’s a spectrum between designing widget for distinctiveness and serving it’s functional purpose versus sacrificing visual queues to satisfy the constraints of a theme. Monochrome happens to be at the extreme end of this gradient; it’s the worst thematic choice for conveying information to our visual cortex.
I never really thought about it until this discussion explicitly called it out, but I do experience trouble finding icons on KDE’s icon tray and now I understand that it’s because they are monochrome. It’s so much easier to spot color icons. I kind of feel artistic designers have been ruining WIMP desktops over the years, making GUI choices that convey less information with more pixels and sacrificing usability in the process. Then again I’m in the function over form camp and I understand that not everyone shares this opinion. At the end of the day people’s opinions are individual preferences, not right or wrong.
Check out the full article, he agrees with your point about color:
“A colored version would be even better (clearer separation of text from icon, faster to find)”.
Ideally we’d have both icons (highlighting important items) and the icons would have distinct colors (differentiating them).
While the points made in the first part of the article, at least, are valid, the article is hardly a shining example of usability itself; it’s full of annoying white circles moving around while you are trying to read the article. 🙁 Eventually I gave up reading it.
That’s just a fun snow effect. You can stop it from the debugging console by running: clearTimeout(snowflakeTimer)
Or the Reader View (F9) in Firefox.
Still, it’s ironic, as Minuous put it.
Still VERY flat.
Looking at that Windows 9x-style menu brings me back to a time when technology felt “real”.
I always change icons on any OS I use, Linux, BSD, etc. But Apple refuses to allow system-wide icon changing apps, and that bugs me. I like MacOS, but allowing people simple customization like that would go a long way to making it feel more mine.