“And they can’t even agree on the direction of an arrow”
Yet another good post by Nikita Prokopov, continuing the theme of icons in Mac OS Tahoe (previously), going into more depth:
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.
I always liked this kind of an exercise:
There’s a game I like to play to test the quality of the metaphor. Remove the labels and try to guess the meaning. Give it a try:
Also, this must hurt:
Microsoft used to know this.
Nick Heer at the excellent Pixel Envy, commenting on the above post, adds:
This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.
h/t my friends Scott and Ezra. I previously linked to Nikita’s work about syntax highlighting.