From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.
Also, I disagree with:
> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”
Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:
> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?
That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.
I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.
I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).
We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:
1) Those that use interface items with text
2) Those that use interface items with icons
3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.
I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.
If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)
After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.
What isn't so helpful though is the classic Google Sheets example where it has three different options (Delete Row, Delete Column, etc.) but all with an identical "trashcan" icon.
Genuinely curious if the item types in as shown in the article are that helpful though. They seem small, fiddly, hard to distinguish between, and not especially intuitive.
did not undergo a stroke, but I find myself often navigating menu by memorizing the location in the menu, I also use the icons for memorizing and then I can speed up by not reading.
The first time I noticed that is the time I needed to operate a Finnish Windows machine and I could get it working pretty good by sheer memory
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
There's illiteracy, and there's functional illiteracy. They're not the same, and people often confuse the two. A literally illiterate person (ha!) wouldn't make headway with almost any realistic computer interface, icons or not.
The 20% statistic is about people who have great trouble reading and comprehending simple sentences, not discerning individual words. It's tragic and debilitating, but such people could muddle through a simple interface with textual labels. A truly illiterate person couldn't.
Is this just your belief presented as fact, or do you have some data to back this up?
(Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").
Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p
Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)
I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).
Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.
Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.
But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.
Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake.
(It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first that started to lose their carefully collected UI expertise and replace it something that was original for the time, but that was all. E.g. I remember the very first ads after Jobs' comeback. They still had the beige Macintoshes, but their ads changed. Instead of a typical computer ad that showed a computer with a turned on screen and some desktop picture Apple's ads pictured turned off computers photographed from unusual angles or in unusual positions, like keyboard standing on its side leaning on the box, mouse hanging on its wire and so on. It was different, indeed, it stood out. Thing is, to always strive for that is harmful. Especially for user interface, where the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.
I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.
Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!
This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
I believe some programs used to let you even drag menu items to the toolbar.
Many KDE apps (Dolphin, Kate, Okular, etc.) let you configure their tool bars (or get rid of them entirely) and set them to show just icons, text, or both (with the text to the side or below). It's the kind of thing most people won't bother with, but for frequently used applications it's nice to be able to customize it to suit your needs. It's done via a config option though, not by dragging menu items to the toolbar (which strikes me as something you could initiate by mistake).
You made me feel old by saying "I believe".
MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.
…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.
I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.
I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.
It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all.
The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have common shared menu items over the OS or they change their placement throughout the app.
Similar is the save icon, though for a different reason. It conveys its function well, but one first needs to know what a floppy disk even is!
Nah, people especially younger ones associate the floppy disk with the save button
A lot of apps people use these days are cloud-first and automatically save all the time, so there's not even a save button to have a floppy icon for! The icon to say that it's synced looks like a cloud, and if you're using a web browser it'll probably have a Download button with a download icon. No floppy disks in sight.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's computer users out there that wouldn't recognise the "save icon".
RIP in peace
they think it's a soda vending machine
My biggest design peeve of the examples posted is the inconsistent indentation of each section of the menu. Where if any single item in the section has an icon it gets indented, but if none do it doesn't, and seeing them next to each other is jarring. I feel this is especially inconsistent design because if a menu item has a check mark it indents all menu items in the whole menu. I would have thought Apple would have the taste to keep things more consistent across the whole menu than that, as it seems sloppy.
I imagine Steve Jobs would've asked to see whoever designed those menues, picked up their laptop and thrown it out the window...
> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
Flat, monochrome icons might look nice, but they are only useful if used sparingly.
If you're going to use many icons, then they need to be visually distinctive. That means ditching the flat designs, and embracing colour again.
Color icons needs to done once for light mode and again for dark mode. The choice then is to keep light/mode and remove colors and shading from icon or move to a single grey color for background and have color icons.
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.
They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on?
One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. This is the same problem AWS has. Their dashboard is just noise, because the icons are neither visually distinct nor descriptive of the project.
I've also seen some of this same problem with card and board games as well. You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it, all the icons are big enough that people can make them out sitting upside down in front of the person across the table from them, even if they're over 40.
His first example, Google Sheets, does well by this metric IMO, but the next few are kinda bad.
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes.
No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box.
First we lost the pinstripes, then brushed aluminium; then we lost colors in the sidebar icons. Then they made everything flat.
Finally we lost the background and legibility.
Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve.
We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.
Never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss Jobs.
> macOS isn't fun anymore.
It was always closed source. That hasn’t changed. That should be a hint.
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done.
The trend towards monochrome, unhinted (blurry) icons certainly doesn’t help.
Yeah and the Amazon color schemes aren't exactly amazing for contrast either.
I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
Same here. I view the text labels as a more detailed description I can read if I don’t understand the icon at first glance. The icons help with decreasing time spent searching for the option I want. Not having to read every single menu item saves some number of milliseconds which adds up over time and reduces cognitive load.
But someone got lazy and all the "Delete" or "Add" icons are identical... There's probably a ticket somewhere to "improve the icons" being ignored..
But that's the point. The icons help you find the "delete" section.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else.
But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here:
> You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, because good use of iconography doesn’t assign “arbitrary” icons to options, jt fields well-known icons that are easily recognizeable. Take for instance the ‘save’ icon - everybody knows what the floppy disc means, even if they have never seen, touched, or used a floppy disc IRL. A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.
They’re not arbitrary at this point - they’re standard.
Not sure I agree. It's much easier for me to find the link icon than "Insert Link" in the Google Docs example. It's seem pretty close to a standard icon so, for me at least, it's helpful to find it. Same wit some of the others like increase indent, decrease indent, left, right, center justification, and lots of others.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.
Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.
>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.
I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.
Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.
Every operator has:
Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move
Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"
Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"
Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'
RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans
Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode
Execution logic: the actual command code
Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:
Operators always have labels. Icons are optional.
Most menu items use no icon by default.
Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.
Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.
When only some things have icons, it's almost like a flag that these things are more special/useful/used. I think that is by far more useful than everything having an icon that you have to think about (or see the text next to it) to understand
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
It's pretty common that some things are more likely to be the things you are looking for than others. Drawing eyes to such things is helpful, whereas putting abstract monochrome line-art icons everywhere is not really helping anyone find anything.
Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.
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.
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!
This.
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.
+1. I love icons, just be consistent. That MacOS example is egregious
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.
In my language “egregious” means “very good”. In English means both very good and very bad. What’s your meaning here? Just to be consistent :)
In practice, "egregious" in English never means very good
It used to!
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.
Exactly. Reading a line of text is a lot slower than recognizing an icon. Those icons are for power users who are really familiar with the app.
This is true when you know what you're looking for, the icons are distinct and you have good eyesight.
I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.
I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
The real test would have been to use some software that the author uses frequently, and see if there's any decrease in speed when removing all the icons. I'm pretty sure, even when not pleasant, they work as heavy visual cues to find the item quicker.
Icons are also very useful if you're trying to use software in a language that you're learning, becoming the common language bridge.
Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.
At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.
People at Apple is gonna read this and they will do a man-month’s worth of meetings but the designer and PM will never agree in whether to remove some or add more, the developers are too busy adding icons to other random places to get a promotion and the QA is filling about missing icons after finally getting around to check Tahoe.
100% disagree. They make finding a group of commands very quickly and it's not like horizontal space in menu is at the premium
Maybe you misunderstood the author. They wrote: ‘It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.’
The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.
As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.
But isn’t the second half of the article the author pointing out a bunch of menu examples from macOS Tahoe where some items have icons and others don’t and still coming to the conclusion that it’s confusing? How is that not a contradiction of the prior declaration?
Yeah, that's a bit inconsistent. I think they are criticizing that it appears to be random which menu items have icons assigned, instead of (for example) giving all important or frequently used items an icon, or in some way that creates visual structure in the menu. Personally, what I find the most disconcerting in those examples is that the menu items aren't consistently inset.
Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag...
The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.
It's extra noise because of the fad for samey B&W icons (instigated by the ease of implementing dark mode). With judicious use of color, there can be more visual distinction where the menus guide you to the intended target by visual memory without having to process the text.
I wonder if part of the problem is the lack of color in these examples? I remember Microsoft Office 97 and 2000, which had icons in their menus (albeit only for a few actions, not for every action). However, those icons were colored and appeared visually distinct from each other.
Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icons for every item. Once again, though, every icon was in color.
And the loss of skeuoumorphism. As much as designers chide it, skeuoumorphic interfaces are, when done well, a massive improvement in usability compared to flat/monochrome ones, both for new and experienced users.
It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
Isn't the Apple Menu basically a start menu though?
Written words don't have colour, and you can parse those with ease.
Seems like something that could be a UI setting per user.
Only text/Only icons/Only icons (with tooltips)/Some icons with text
Somewhat tangential:
> What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).
> They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
They sure do, and just like biological evolution it is not a principled process. Sometimes evolution results in a worse outcome.
Two extensions/patches I'd like to see for macOS:
1. Remove all icons from menus.
2. Make mouse-over do nothing - I should be able to move the mouse anywhere on the screen, and nothing should change colour/pop out etc.
Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time.
I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
[deleted]
Perhaps the solution is to split the menu up instead of giving you a long, tedious menu that is unparseable without even more visual noise of icons.
UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.
Disagree entirely, pictographs are easier to recognize than text descriptions of features and functions.
If I remember Windows 95/98/XP correctly, these icons were in menus only if there was the same icon on the panel. This would let you see there's a shorter way to do the action.
Right now icons indeed just add clutter.
They also make you think how could the designer depict a concept.
For example, why should "Save" button look like a diskette. What if it was Jesus, like the Christ Redeemer statue. That actually could be a funny game, like in the post, to invent icons.
I agree that there should not be icons in menus (with the exception of those indicating the status, like is shown in the 2005 guidelines). (Arrangements, shapes, etc might also sometimes be useful to indicate, but these should be separate from status indicators if they are present, and should be a part of the text instead in the few cases where they are applicable; in most cases they should not be needed.)
Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)
Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).
My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
In earlier versions of Apple OSes, you could edit the menus yourself, with the officially supplied resource file editor app and there was nothing really special about it.
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
Sad, really...
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
No idea why I'm like this.
Interesting take. As a low vision person, the icons help me scan menus like this.
From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."
Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
I think the problem might be generational… the only people who know - or care - about the HIG are older millennials
yearning for old apple and order, current times and genz are more chaotic. not sure if it's generational, old apple was obsessed about design, now HIG is mostly optional. they now even use hamburger on websites which was a big no in the past.
HIGs change. what made sense for people who first used computers in their 30s might not make sense for people which used them since 7
I think you’re underestimating how many people grew up with GUIs 30-40 years ago.
i hope this is a fringe opinion as im usually putting icons on every item and found it leads to reduced mental overload and fast item selections, for complex menus i would even go so far as making it colored to more senses can be used. the icons have to be meaningful though, apples guidelines specifically mention arbitrary icons not icons at all
I hope so too, and I agree on the colored icons for pro apps. Mac user for 20 years, also using Windows on and off, and I've always liked the menu icons on Windows. A move away from minimalism that makes sense. The fact that they're not cargo-culting their 20 year old HIG is promising, really.
But they really should keep the indentations consistent, they're increasing cognitive load for no reason by not doing that.
I also like the hotkeys or whatever (the underlined letter in menu items and dialog box buttons), and maybe that is a fringe opinion among Apple users.
I want icons everywhere. They can literally be meaningless but it’s way way easier to find “2nd item in matching icon set” than it is to read every item in a list.
It has always been so since the dawn of modern desktops. I don’t see how/why this is noise. This is like a developer at a standup insisting we can make the app faster adding some micro services, flashy UX, and a few months of work while the - end user will still enter 20 order changes in an 8 hour day because that’s the environment.
What will you gain from removing the icons?
I think the key in apples guidelines is the word arbitrary. A lot/ most of the icons in apples menus are purpose made for the menu item - so it’s not as big of an issue.
I think that icons hold value so long as they have mostly distinct colors (which none of his examples do, so his point stands). At least for me, colors make vastly superior landmark than words do (once i know the interface).
>For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why?
Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.
I love it for quickly finding items.
The examples he showed, I didn’t mind. From the title, I thought he might be referring to the emojis in READMEs. Those annoy me and don’t add anything. (I assume all vibe-coded)
> (I assume all vibe-coded)
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
Don't agree with this take - it's quick to scan for the delete icon.
The disagreement here is interesting. I'm with OP, icons increase cognitive load for me if overused but can help a lot if there are just a few distinct ones.
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).
My best guess for the sparse icons in older MacOS versions: icons only for frequently-used menu items.
Probably this should be configurable, so people who want icons only or text only or both can make that choice. I like that KDE makes that possible.
Perhaps we are witnessing a early shift toward ideographic writing
Former UI guy at Google here.
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
There are other reasons too but that's a big one.
You don’t have to have icons for every menu item for this to work though. One copy icon is enough for the whole block.
Even worse, Windows now has menus with only icons and no text.
I think this is true, if you can read in the language.
Its really difficult to help someone on tech issues if their device is configured for a language you don't understand. Simply changing the language is annoying, b/c then they can't understand the workflow I'm showing them in their language.
Look how they massacred my boy
Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me.
Deal with it.
Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Enough.
I always took it as a plus for soft internationalization, e.g. we may not have translated or localized to the current user language, but icons area decent generic hint.
Hilarious: I looked at first two examples on the page, showing a menu and contextual menu, and I saw no problem. Icons? What icons?
That's when I realized that, much like advertisements on a web page, my brain had utterly filtered them out.
My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.
The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.
I like them
Wow. Icons in Menus are so useful that I absolutely didn't expect this article is to complain about them. They help me location the item I'm trying to click tremendously.
Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?
His example of great icons from Finder is stolen directly from the Rectangle app. Looks like Apple shamelessly took Rectangle's icons.
There are so many reasons to add icons as many have already stated here. One reason i didnt see is for multi lang help. Sometimes the icon is enough when i dont know the language used.
However, i think what may be described here is that apps often deviate from a “universal” standard or reuse something to mean another. This defeats most of the benefits of using icons imo.
I like it.
This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.
From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.
Also, I disagree with:
> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”
Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:
> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?
That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.
I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.
I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).
We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:
1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.
I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.
If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)
After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.
What isn't so helpful though is the classic Google Sheets example where it has three different options (Delete Row, Delete Column, etc.) but all with an identical "trashcan" icon.
Genuinely curious if the item types in as shown in the article are that helpful though. They seem small, fiddly, hard to distinguish between, and not especially intuitive.
did not undergo a stroke, but I find myself often navigating menu by memorizing the location in the menu, I also use the icons for memorizing and then I can speed up by not reading.
The first time I noticed that is the time I needed to operate a Finnish Windows machine and I could get it working pretty good by sheer memory
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
There's illiteracy, and there's functional illiteracy. They're not the same, and people often confuse the two. A literally illiterate person (ha!) wouldn't make headway with almost any realistic computer interface, icons or not.
The 20% statistic is about people who have great trouble reading and comprehending simple sentences, not discerning individual words. It's tragic and debilitating, but such people could muddle through a simple interface with textual labels. A truly illiterate person couldn't.
Is this just your belief presented as fact, or do you have some data to back this up?
(Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").
Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p
Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)
I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).
Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.
Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.
But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.
Pictograms in the interface are not decoration. Their purpose is to convey information in limited space. (The information should be that could be conveyed this way.) Currently they are often used as decorations or these two uses are mixed up. This is a mistake.
(It is interesting and saddening to see how years of UI research just went down the drain after Apple "resurrection". In my impression Apple was the first that started to lose their carefully collected UI expertise and replace it something that was original for the time, but that was all. E.g. I remember the very first ads after Jobs' comeback. They still had the beige Macintoshes, but their ads changed. Instead of a typical computer ad that showed a computer with a turned on screen and some desktop picture Apple's ads pictured turned off computers photographed from unusual angles or in unusual positions, like keyboard standing on its side leaning on the box, mouse hanging on its wire and so on. It was different, indeed, it stood out. Thing is, to always strive for that is harmful. Especially for user interface, where the motto is: do not make it original, make it right.)
I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.
I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.
Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!
This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
I believe some programs used to let you even drag menu items to the toolbar.
Many KDE apps (Dolphin, Kate, Okular, etc.) let you configure their tool bars (or get rid of them entirely) and set them to show just icons, text, or both (with the text to the side or below). It's the kind of thing most people won't bother with, but for frequently used applications it's nice to be able to customize it to suit your needs. It's done via a config option though, not by dragging menu items to the toolbar (which strikes me as something you could initiate by mistake).
You made me feel old by saying "I believe".
MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.
…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.
I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.
I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.
It doesn't actually matter that much what the icon is. It's impossible to creat icons people would fully understand - otherwise you wouldn't need a label at all.
The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).
There are other factors like consistent placement that can help. This icon approach is good especially if you have common shared menu items over the OS or they change their placement throughout the app.
Similar is the save icon, though for a different reason. It conveys its function well, but one first needs to know what a floppy disk even is!
Nah, people especially younger ones associate the floppy disk with the save button
A lot of apps people use these days are cloud-first and automatically save all the time, so there's not even a save button to have a floppy icon for! The icon to say that it's synced looks like a cloud, and if you're using a web browser it'll probably have a Download button with a download icon. No floppy disks in sight.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's computer users out there that wouldn't recognise the "save icon".
RIP in peace
they think it's a soda vending machine
My biggest design peeve of the examples posted is the inconsistent indentation of each section of the menu. Where if any single item in the section has an icon it gets indented, but if none do it doesn't, and seeing them next to each other is jarring. I feel this is especially inconsistent design because if a menu item has a check mark it indents all menu items in the whole menu. I would have thought Apple would have the taste to keep things more consistent across the whole menu than that, as it seems sloppy.
I imagine Steve Jobs would've asked to see whoever designed those menues, picked up their laptop and thrown it out the window...
> Hey, unless you can articulate a really good reason to add this, maybe our default posture should be no icons in menus?
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
Flat, monochrome icons might look nice, but they are only useful if used sparingly.
If you're going to use many icons, then they need to be visually distinctive. That means ditching the flat designs, and embracing colour again.
Color icons needs to done once for light mode and again for dark mode. The choice then is to keep light/mode and remove colors and shading from icon or move to a single grey color for background and have color icons.
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.
They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
Almost 30 years ago MS Office 97 was putting toolbar icons in their menus, and I think it served the useful function of helping users discover when functionality was available another way.
There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on?
One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. This is the same problem AWS has. Their dashboard is just noise, because the icons are neither visually distinct nor descriptive of the project.
I've also seen some of this same problem with card and board games as well. You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it, all the icons are big enough that people can make them out sitting upside down in front of the person across the table from them, even if they're over 40.
His first example, Google Sheets, does well by this metric IMO, but the next few are kinda bad.
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes.
No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box.
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html
The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines.
https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/
Frankly it's senseless.
https://www.flarup.email/p/through-the-liquid-glass
Insane but still working legacy workaround:
https://simonbs.dev/posts/how-to-bring-back-oddly-shaped-app...
…
macOS isn't fun anymore.
First we lost the pinstripes, then brushed aluminium; then we lost colors in the sidebar icons. Then they made everything flat.
Finally we lost the background and legibility.
Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve.
We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.
Never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss Jobs.
> macOS isn't fun anymore.
It was always closed source. That hasn’t changed. That should be a hint.
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done.
The trend towards monochrome, unhinted (blurry) icons certainly doesn’t help.
Yeah and the Amazon color schemes aren't exactly amazing for contrast either.
I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
Same here. I view the text labels as a more detailed description I can read if I don’t understand the icon at first glance. The icons help with decreasing time spent searching for the option I want. Not having to read every single menu item saves some number of milliseconds which adds up over time and reduces cognitive load.
But someone got lazy and all the "Delete" or "Add" icons are identical... There's probably a ticket somewhere to "improve the icons" being ignored..
But that's the point. The icons help you find the "delete" section.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
It really depends. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, like everything else.
But I do feel like he’s hurting his case here:
> You know what would be a fun game? Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
That’s an excellent example of how effective icons actually are! I can mostly read that menu at a glance with no text lables, because good use of iconography doesn’t assign “arbitrary” icons to options, jt fields well-known icons that are easily recognizeable. Take for instance the ‘save’ icon - everybody knows what the floppy disc means, even if they have never seen, touched, or used a floppy disc IRL. A 15 year old born in 2010 knows what the ‘save’ icon is. My nearly 70 year old mother knows what the ‘share’ curly arrow icon means.
They’re not arbitrary at this point - they’re standard.
Not sure I agree. It's much easier for me to find the link icon than "Insert Link" in the Google Docs example. It's seem pretty close to a standard icon so, for me at least, it's helpful to find it. Same wit some of the others like increase indent, decrease indent, left, right, center justification, and lots of others.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.
Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.
>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.
I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?
This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.
Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.
Every operator has:
Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move
Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"
Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"
Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'
RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans
Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode
Execution logic: the actual command code
Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:
Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.
Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.
When only some things have icons, it's almost like a flag that these things are more special/useful/used. I think that is by far more useful than everything having an icon that you have to think about (or see the text next to it) to understand
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
It's pretty common that some things are more likely to be the things you are looking for than others. Drawing eyes to such things is helpful, whereas putting abstract monochrome line-art icons everywhere is not really helping anyone find anything.
Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.
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.
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!
This.
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.
+1. I love icons, just be consistent. That MacOS example is egregious
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.
In my language “egregious” means “very good”. In English means both very good and very bad. What’s your meaning here? Just to be consistent :)
In practice, "egregious" in English never means very good
It used to!
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.
Literally. Oh wait, I mean not literally?
Arguably.
I could care less!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457
https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarretthe...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-le...
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):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823632
MrHeather on April 9, 2020 | parent | next [–]
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.
Exactly. Reading a line of text is a lot slower than recognizing an icon. Those icons are for power users who are really familiar with the app.
This is true when you know what you're looking for, the icons are distinct and you have good eyesight.
I think this is an example of the emojification of communication. I suspect that trend is being sustained, at least, by LLMs who are prone to abusing vapid emojis everywhere.
I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
The real test would have been to use some software that the author uses frequently, and see if there's any decrease in speed when removing all the icons. I'm pretty sure, even when not pleasant, they work as heavy visual cues to find the item quicker.
Icons are also very useful if you're trying to use software in a language that you're learning, becoming the common language bridge.
Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.
At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.
People at Apple is gonna read this and they will do a man-month’s worth of meetings but the designer and PM will never agree in whether to remove some or add more, the developers are too busy adding icons to other random places to get a promotion and the QA is filling about missing icons after finally getting around to check Tahoe.
100% disagree. They make finding a group of commands very quickly and it's not like horizontal space in menu is at the premium
Maybe you misunderstood the author. They wrote: ‘It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.’
The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.
As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.
But isn’t the second half of the article the author pointing out a bunch of menu examples from macOS Tahoe where some items have icons and others don’t and still coming to the conclusion that it’s confusing? How is that not a contradiction of the prior declaration?
Yeah, that's a bit inconsistent. I think they are criticizing that it appears to be random which menu items have icons assigned, instead of (for example) giving all important or frequently used items an icon, or in some way that creates visual structure in the menu. Personally, what I find the most disconcerting in those examples is that the menu items aren't consistently inset.
Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag... The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.
It's extra noise because of the fad for samey B&W icons (instigated by the ease of implementing dark mode). With judicious use of color, there can be more visual distinction where the menus guide you to the intended target by visual memory without having to process the text.
I wonder if part of the problem is the lack of color in these examples? I remember Microsoft Office 97 and 2000, which had icons in their menus (albeit only for a few actions, not for every action). However, those icons were colored and appeared visually distinct from each other.
Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icons for every item. Once again, though, every icon was in color.
And the loss of skeuoumorphism. As much as designers chide it, skeuoumorphic interfaces are, when done well, a massive improvement in usability compared to flat/monochrome ones, both for new and experienced users.
It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
Isn't the Apple Menu basically a start menu though?
Written words don't have colour, and you can parse those with ease.
Seems like something that could be a UI setting per user.
Only text/Only icons/Only icons (with tooltips)/Some icons with text
Somewhat tangential:
> What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).
> They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”
2005?? Guidelines evolve.
Here's from 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
They sure do, and just like biological evolution it is not a principled process. Sometimes evolution results in a worse outcome.
Two extensions/patches I'd like to see for macOS:
1. Remove all icons from menus.
2. Make mouse-over do nothing - I should be able to move the mouse anywhere on the screen, and nothing should change colour/pop out etc.
Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time. I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
Perhaps the solution is to split the menu up instead of giving you a long, tedious menu that is unparseable without even more visual noise of icons.
UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.
Disagree entirely, pictographs are easier to recognize than text descriptions of features and functions.
If I remember Windows 95/98/XP correctly, these icons were in menus only if there was the same icon on the panel. This would let you see there's a shorter way to do the action.
Right now icons indeed just add clutter.
They also make you think how could the designer depict a concept.
For example, why should "Save" button look like a diskette. What if it was Jesus, like the Christ Redeemer statue. That actually could be a funny game, like in the post, to invent icons.
I agree that there should not be icons in menus (with the exception of those indicating the status, like is shown in the 2005 guidelines). (Arrangements, shapes, etc might also sometimes be useful to indicate, but these should be separate from status indicators if they are present, and should be a part of the text instead in the few cases where they are applicable; in most cases they should not be needed.)
Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)
Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).
My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
In earlier versions of Apple OSes, you could edit the menus yourself, with the officially supplied resource file editor app and there was nothing really special about it.
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
Sad, really...
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
No idea why I'm like this.
Interesting take. As a low vision person, the icons help me scan menus like this.
From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."
Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
Icons in menus do follow the 2025 HIG: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
2020 was linked in another thread here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...
I think the problem might be generational… the only people who know - or care - about the HIG are older millennials
yearning for old apple and order, current times and genz are more chaotic. not sure if it's generational, old apple was obsessed about design, now HIG is mostly optional. they now even use hamburger on websites which was a big no in the past.
HIGs change. what made sense for people who first used computers in their 30s might not make sense for people which used them since 7
I think you’re underestimating how many people grew up with GUIs 30-40 years ago.
i hope this is a fringe opinion as im usually putting icons on every item and found it leads to reduced mental overload and fast item selections, for complex menus i would even go so far as making it colored to more senses can be used. the icons have to be meaningful though, apples guidelines specifically mention arbitrary icons not icons at all
I hope so too, and I agree on the colored icons for pro apps. Mac user for 20 years, also using Windows on and off, and I've always liked the menu icons on Windows. A move away from minimalism that makes sense. The fact that they're not cargo-culting their 20 year old HIG is promising, really.
But they really should keep the indentations consistent, they're increasing cognitive load for no reason by not doing that.
I also like the hotkeys or whatever (the underlined letter in menu items and dialog box buttons), and maybe that is a fringe opinion among Apple users.
I want icons everywhere. They can literally be meaningless but it’s way way easier to find “2nd item in matching icon set” than it is to read every item in a list.
It has always been so since the dawn of modern desktops. I don’t see how/why this is noise. This is like a developer at a standup insisting we can make the app faster adding some micro services, flashy UX, and a few months of work while the - end user will still enter 20 order changes in an 8 hour day because that’s the environment.
What will you gain from removing the icons?
I think the key in apples guidelines is the word arbitrary. A lot/ most of the icons in apples menus are purpose made for the menu item - so it’s not as big of an issue.
I think that icons hold value so long as they have mostly distinct colors (which none of his examples do, so his point stands). At least for me, colors make vastly superior landmark than words do (once i know the interface).
>For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why?
Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.
I love it for quickly finding items.
The examples he showed, I didn’t mind. From the title, I thought he might be referring to the emojis in READMEs. Those annoy me and don’t add anything. (I assume all vibe-coded)
> (I assume all vibe-coded)
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
Don't agree with this take - it's quick to scan for the delete icon.
The disagreement here is interesting. I'm with OP, icons increase cognitive load for me if overused but can help a lot if there are just a few distinct ones.
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).
My best guess for the sparse icons in older MacOS versions: icons only for frequently-used menu items.
Probably this should be configurable, so people who want icons only or text only or both can make that choice. I like that KDE makes that possible.
Perhaps we are witnessing a early shift toward ideographic writing
Former UI guy at Google here.
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
There are other reasons too but that's a big one.
You don’t have to have icons for every menu item for this to work though. One copy icon is enough for the whole block.
Even worse, Windows now has menus with only icons and no text.
I think this is true, if you can read in the language.
Its really difficult to help someone on tech issues if their device is configured for a language you don't understand. Simply changing the language is annoying, b/c then they can't understand the workflow I'm showing them in their language.
Look how they massacred my boy
Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me.
Deal with it.
Another article in the category of "I am an able-bodied anglophone silicon valley man and I think X should not exist because it doesn't serve ME". Ignoring and ignorant that there are 8 billion people out there, of varying ethnic and linguistic background, with different ableness, of different education and literacy levels.
Enough.
I always took it as a plus for soft internationalization, e.g. we may not have translated or localized to the current user language, but icons area decent generic hint.
Hilarious: I looked at first two examples on the page, showing a menu and contextual menu, and I saw no problem. Icons? What icons?
That's when I realized that, much like advertisements on a web page, my brain had utterly filtered them out.
My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.
The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.
I like them
Wow. Icons in Menus are so useful that I absolutely didn't expect this article is to complain about them. They help me location the item I'm trying to click tremendously.
Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?
His example of great icons from Finder is stolen directly from the Rectangle app. Looks like Apple shamelessly took Rectangle's icons.
There are so many reasons to add icons as many have already stated here. One reason i didnt see is for multi lang help. Sometimes the icon is enough when i dont know the language used.
However, i think what may be described here is that apps often deviate from a “universal” standard or reuse something to mean another. This defeats most of the benefits of using icons imo.
I like it.
This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.