As someone who works on UI’s a lot, I always have trouble knowing where to use an icon, where to use text, and where to use both. The problem gets amplified to when we’re trying to make apps that work on all size devices… where horizontal space is limited, you almost always want icons only.
The article makes a good point about decluttering dropdown menus / vertical lists, but it’d be nice to see where it makes sense for all the other UI elements.
The fact that having too many icons creates clutter is something I didn’t think of before, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. Putting icons next to items that are most commonly used helps draw attention to them, and when you see it side by side it’s clear that being selective works a lot better. Good UI design is really hard to do, and not always intuitive I find. Apple used to put a lot of work into doing actual UX research, and they’ve published a lot of interesting insights over the years, but seems like they just kind of stopped caring now.
It’d be really nice if there was a site listing and comparing a lot of design decisions. I usually just go by google’s material design standards, but its not always the best.
As someone who works on UI’s a lot, I always have trouble knowing where to use an icon, where to use text, and where to use both. The problem gets amplified to when we’re trying to make apps that work on all size devices… where horizontal space is limited, you almost always want icons only.
The article makes a good point about decluttering dropdown menus / vertical lists, but it’d be nice to see where it makes sense for all the other UI elements.
The fact that having too many icons creates clutter is something I didn’t think of before, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. Putting icons next to items that are most commonly used helps draw attention to them, and when you see it side by side it’s clear that being selective works a lot better. Good UI design is really hard to do, and not always intuitive I find. Apple used to put a lot of work into doing actual UX research, and they’ve published a lot of interesting insights over the years, but seems like they just kind of stopped caring now.
It’d be really nice if there was a site listing and comparing a lot of design decisions. I usually just go by google’s material design standards, but its not always the best.
For sure, it’d be interesting to see why different systems make particular design decisions compared side by side. This is one of the reasons I found older apple HIG docs interesting because they give actual rationale for the decisions, so it doesn’t feel arbitrary. It’s osx focused, but a lot of it is generally applicable and definitely worth a glance https://blog-geofcrowl-static-images.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2020-02-17-collection-higs/Apple-OSXHIGuidelines-2009.pdf
Nice thx, I’ll check it out.