My problem with graphics and symbols
When I updated Firefox recently, I noticed that certain familiar and comforting words – “bookmarks,” for example – that used to point to the obvious and could be clicked on without much thought, have been replaced by symbols.
And I can’t learn the symbols. At least, I haven’t so far, not in any way that has become automatic.
So far (and it’s been several weeks) the symbols mean nothing to me unless I translate them into words. One would think that the symbols’ placement would help – and it does, a little. But there’s always that moment of transition when I look to the top of the screen and am surprised to see a row of meaningless drawings that I have to concentrate on in order to decide where to click, an action that used to be seamless and thought-free and now involves hesitation and thought.
The extra time involved is small, perhaps a second or two or three at most. But repeat that over and over and it gets very annoying.
The only symbol I recognize from before is that for “refresh,” a semicircular arrow that I assume you’re all familiar with, too. But now it’s in the wrong place; it used to be on the right of the row and now it’s on the left. Why?
Why? Why change it? Just because that’s what the people who design these updates like to do?
Ye olde “bookmarks” is now an underlined star, “history” a clock, and “new window” some sort of square with a plus in the lower right corner. That means I have to stare at the symbols, translate them to words and then translate them to other words. To me, the first words that come to mind for those symbols are “star,” not “bookmarks”; “square” not “new window”; and “clock,” not “history.” There’s also a little house for the firefox home page (house, you get it? I didn’t, because it requires the transition from “house” to “home” and then to “home page”). But I rarely use that one anyway and so it annoys me somewhat less.
Who prefers little graphics over words? Computer people? Young people? People who use only cellphones? To me, all those little symbols – actually, all little symbols – look somewhat alike, and they all go into the category of “little drawings a bit like cartoons.”
Hmmm—cartoons. The dread cartoons.
I am not dyslexic, and I had no trouble learning to read. Is there something called dyslexia for graphics? If so, I’ve got it.
Tell me I’m not alone, folks.
UPDATE 9/22 2 PM:
I managed to restore the words but I can’t get rid of the symbols. Still, it’s progress.
As of now, the symbols are prominently displayed and highlighted with a white background, to the right of the “back” arrow and to the left of the bar with the URL. The eye inevitably goes to them. I’ve tried getting rid of them in various ways but no dice. However, at this point, above all of that, the words “History” and “Bookmarks” (and a few more, such as “Tools” and “Help”) have reappeared, due to my customizing the page. The “refresh” symbol (which was a symbol rather than a word long before this all happened) stubbornly remains in its new, harder-to-see, harder-to-find position.
Ancient Egyptians. That’s who.
One thing we don’t need is more people learning to code. They will only be trying to make more money by changing things to show their creativity. I think tech companies (and manufacturers should have a grandma next to the CEO to say when we don’t need things. Keep it simple, stupid.
Yeah, annoys the hell out of me as well.
H1B visas rampant.
They should have kept Brandon Eich around.
Dwaz:
I feel better already 🙂 .
Ha, so ironic emojis then. Very well.
I suspect the switch to symbols from words is to accommodate the reduced screen real estate available on hand held devices such as smart phones, which more and more people use more or less exclusively these days (e.g.; youngsters).
P.S. I’ve been in the software industry for nearly 40 years, first as a developer and more recently selling. A consistent design goal for any program or application is to simplify, make the interface more intuitive, and reduce the number of clicks required to execute a particular function. I don’t see or encounter many instances of folks making changes for no practical reason.
Neo, I’m also icon-illiterate. I say I can do math in my head, but I’m not qualified to work at McDonald’s since I can’t tell the difference between a Big Mac icon and a Double Cheeseburger icon.
Yes, I also find it annoying. But I can explain it, ’cause I’m a bit of an insider.
Having worked in the tech-sector for a while, I’ve found that there are usually three interacting motives behind these annoying User Interface (UI) decisions.
Saving Room
One motive is to save room in the UI design (especially on small screens; e.g. cellphones), save expense & effort on translating button labels, and make the thing usable even to barely-literate persons. It’s really difficult to make a UI look spacious and attractive at a glance. It’s even more difficult when the buttons have long labels on them. (And if you think a label is long in English, just wait until they translate it to German. It is the world’s most annoying target for translating a design, because every word or phrase doubles in length and throws all your spacing to hell and gone. Words like “Cancel” turn into “Gunter glieben glauchen globen mit schweinnschwartz.”)
The UI Fidget
Another motive is what I call “The UI Fidget.” After enough time passes, designers just get tired of looking at the layout that they (or an earlier group of designers) put together a year ago. They get fidgety: They want to change it up, “make it fresh.” So they throw a lot of ideas at a wall (or a whiteboard) to see what sticks. (I would say they were trying to justify their jobs, but they’re designers; they don’t habitually think in such terms. It’s an aesthetic fidgetyness.)
The Next Fad
But the final motive is the most pernicious: The designers start seeing a “design trend” in other designers’ work — not just on other pieces of software, but on Ikea build instructions and street signs and whatever else — and they start comparing it to what they’ve already built and they begin to feel like their designs are old and out-of-fashion and “so last year.”
Then, when some industry publication identifies a new trend and assigns a name for it (e.g. “skeuomorphic” design vs. “flat” design vs. “material” design) all the designers start talking about it all the time as if to ensure every person within earshot is reassured that they’re up on the latest design fads. (Oh, sure, there are always tendentious studies and straw-man examples to illustrate why one approach is superior to the other, but if you’ve played this game for long enough you can easily remember the last two “design paradigm shifts” that got us to where we are now for equally-suspect reasons.)
And pretty soon the designers produce a pretty picture for the execs. The execs quickly agree, partly so they don’t seem out-of-touch with design trends, and partly because they’ve seen something similar in a Podcast App they recently downloaded. So, even though your company makes a Mortgage Application App or an Angry Birds Spinoff or whatever, your execs quickly approve a redesign patterned after some exec’s latest happy experience surfing in the Apple Store.
Neo, to answer your question, all that is why these things happen.
These aren’t good reasons, of course. But they’re very human, very tech-corp kinds of reasons.
Try this:
On the area of the screen to the right of an open Tab in Firefox, right-click and select Customize… A screen with the icons you’re talking about should open. Have it ready but don’t do anything with it yet.
On the area of the screen at the very top, just to the right of the menu icons you’re talking about, right-click and select Menu Bar. The traditional menu bar should appear. (If it doesn’t, I don’t know what to do.)
Assuming you were able to restore the traditional Menu Bar, select and drag the icons, one by one, into the Customize screen you just opened. The icons will be there if you ever change your mind!
(I hope this works. I’m assuming your version of Firefox still has the traditional Menu Bar. I have v. 69.0.1 (64-bit) in Windows 10 Home. If you DO have the traditional Menu Bar available, I don’t know why they hide it when Firefox updates.)
We have come full circle and are now back to hieroglyphics.
I agree with R.C. on his 2nd and 3rd reasons, but his first, Saving Room, which is what Steve Walsh also said is something I think is incorrect. I believe there are different versions of software for a PC and a phone. A phone has to accommodate scrolling with a finger while a PC has to accommodate a mouse. Plus they work with different operating systems.
As a programmer who develops interfaces, this is their idea of dumbing down and diversifying the system… its also change is improving even if it isnt..
its a wonderful thing to be in the position and try to tell them that this is bad
or explain that helping them search, makes searching harder not easier
or explain that you cant number 999,999,999 in 8 places and only use numbers (got fired for that when when marketing said i was refusing to do it because i liked being difficult… and the boss was as mathematically illiterate… )
and why cant we add two more places?
because people dont like to type numbers and wont do it?
really?
they had been taught by classics and i couldnt tell them we are past the ma bell number study.
yes.. i have a memory that has memorized thousands and thousands of papers and things and plotted them that i can refernce them
they did not know why they didnt want more than 7 numbers or 8, but i did
there was no appreciation though.. not one iota of “wow, he remembered THAT”
i even found the article and printed it
“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
http://www2.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Miller%20GA%20Magical%20Seven%20Psych%20Review%201955.pdf
funny that this is in peterson directory… who knew till i just did this?
anyway…
i have worked on systems i could tell would not work
but you get fired telling them.. even worse if your right
then they think you broke it to make yourself right
casandra syndrome
there is really no course that teaches functional psychology for programmers
one thing that makes me a better analyst and productive is i know what works
and i know what people will or will not do after writing so much…
the bosses think their will or such is enough to over come that… its not
ask a magician, and programming and interface implementation has to do with psychology
and we get a lot of bad stuff because we have people who are not realistic about how we work or are.. they are quiet vacuous on details and lack social experience having mostly been raised by single moms not reared in families… (you raise corn, you rear animals – you dont have to teach corn)
the best technology is technology you use and never ever think about
dont believe me? how great is a light switch? its perfect.. reliable… easy..
never think about it till it breaks.
the idea of going to symbols is taking the idea of homogeneous traffic signs helping people drive world wide
ok.. your trained three bars means menu… and on and on… they believe they are giving you a alternative that all languages can understand… and dont have to be trained… but in truth, they gave a selection that is not any language that one has to self train (to neo annoyance in)
last fun one… certain keys and keys combinations have been used so much they are almost standard witthout being written down.. cntrl-h is help… so is F1… etc..
one day i am working and the crazy super wealthy woman i worked for comes in and wants to switch all those defaults around. im thinking of how freaking annoying it would be for one sight out of a 1000 to do it differently and cause people to have to remember the ‘right way’ for 1000 and the ‘wrong way’ for the 1 or 2
she told me… no, we are going to set the new standard..
hard to look at people who are seriously thinking they can wander in
re-designate keys
and that thousand other sites would be forced to scramble their keys to keep up with this forward thinker
this was what was better in business i was told..
I have heard people in the business say that programmers just jumble things around because they want to make a mark for themselves. Which is certainly not an honorable priority.
Artfldgr:
Interesting.
Isn’t an obvious reason for replacing words with symbols that it is language-independent? They don’t have to do development, or at least less development, for different languages.
FOAF:
They already had the words in different languages.
I still have all the words on my Firefox top but that may be because it is a mac and not a PC. Different standards. Yup. Just looked at how they’ve got the PC set up. A real dogs dinner for most but great if you are illiterate.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
I have version 69 on my Windows 10 laptop and I still see words, not these dreaded symbols.
In reply to Bruce:
Bruce, you said, “I agree with R.C. on his 2nd and 3rd reasons, but his first, Saving Room, which is what Steve Walsh also said is something I think is incorrect.”
You correctly say that the phone version and the PC version are separate versions of the software. We could add the Mac version and the Linux version.
But what I’m getting at is the UI design, and while that’s implemented with slightly different widget libraries on different platforms, and adjustments have to be made, it’s the same designers following the same trends in almost all cases.
And the reason they’re all pushing to save space is that they are now designing Mobile First, because most web-browsing on this planet is now done from phones and small mobile tablets, not from desktops and laptops.
There used to be the money and the will to have a separate design optimized for desktop, that will no longer exists. Design departments now regard it to be a waste of resources to dedicate extra time and effort to the desktop, which they regard as a non-growth platform.
So the mobile-friendly design mocks and wireframes get delivered to the Devs, who then come back with questions about platform-specific quirks. The desired end result is parity, or near-parity across all devices. First, on the phones, of course. But the less-popular devices (desktops) wind up getting migrated towards whatever design elements seem to work best on the popular devices. Thus the cost-savings in design-time.
This is not speculation on my part. I do this work. The popular, high-traffic site I’m involved with is trying to copy the UI of the smartphone app for the same firm as closely as possible, even though they’re 3 different programming languages (JS vs. Swift vs. Java, specifically) and 3 different device/environment categories (mobile-web vs. mobile-native vs. desktop web).
Obviously my experience, and Steve’s, isn’t necessarily universal, but I think it’s common. One of the groups I work with shares talent with news organizations you’d have heard of, and accounting organizations you’d have heard of, and, well, a major home-supply retailer you’ve heard of. The experience seems pretty common across that crowd, for sure. There are probably still shops that use entirely different designs for mobile and desktop experiences, but they’re the minority.
And I suspect you’ve seen this change, if you think about it. Remember when most websites had a navigation bar down the left side, with many stacked buttons there, plus a few across the top? Now think how many of them have gone to a few buttons on the top, nothing much on the left save perhaps some Social Share buttons (Facebook, etc.), and then: Ta-Da! a “hamburger menu.” (That’s the menu with the 3 stacked lines as its icon.)
That’s mobile-first design migrating into your desktop experience. Shrink the browser window-width down to 400px, and it looks a lot like a phone, because that’s what it was designed for.
I have Firefox 69.01 for Mac and still have the menu bar appearing at the very top, although I believe there are options to hide it or make it go away.
Neo, if you wish to confuse yourself a little more, download and install the Brave browser, Brandon Eich’s project. It certainly has some privacy advantages, but may take a little getting used to.
It’s not just computers. It’s been something like 20 years since symbols rather than words began appearing on clothing care labels, and I STILL have to look many of them up. The symbols are so stylized that they have been stripped of most obvious meaning. I can fathom that a hand in a little stylized basin means “hand wash” with no trouble, but how can I deduce that circles mean dry cleaning and that cryptic letters inside the circles or lines outside the circles mean different kinds of dry cleaning, or that triangles with various different stripes in them have something to do with bleach?
Makes me so mad. How many millennia ago did humans figure out that alphabets communicate meaning more efficiently than pictures? Yet here it is, 2019, and I have to stop in the middle of doing laundry, squint helplessly at an incomprehensible array of squiggles and then sigh and go upstairs to find a computer or my phone to figure out whether I can put some scrap of clothing in the machine.
Grr.
And get off my lawn.
neo – there still might be economic motivations for reducing the number of versions/options as the software undergoes continuous development. Just guessing though.
Mrs Whatsit:
Fortunately most of my clothing labels still use enough words that I can understand them.
Very fortunately.
I also almost never buy clothing that needs dry cleaning any more. The cleaning tends to cost more than the clothing.
Btw, I use Chrome, which also uses lots of symbols, but note that if you hover the pointer over the symbol text for the function appears, e.g.; “Reload this page”.
You are absolutely not alone Neo. My wife (10 yrs younger than I) complains about my complaints about the transition from words to pictures, I think it’s because our children aren’t learning to read in school anymore.
My other complaint is that software companies no longer produce user guides. They now rely solely on their users to provide help voluntarily.
When you click a “help” icon (not a word in a menu drop) you are linked to web pages where users have posted their own comments.
In my own paranoid ideation, I see this shift as pro-young, anti-senior, since us geezers adapt more slowly and because we are unnecessary drags and deadweights. The young believe themselves ageless, they are “woke”, brave and cool. The world should belong to them, and in time it will, with Chinese overlords. In the meantime, each of them sits in his own box, with invisible but certain walls, texting without speaking and with no eye contact. The Left loves this!
I agree with you Neo. The computer geeks reinvent this stuff every week.
I think the designers need to justify their existence by reworking everything every so often. Otherwise, why would they need jobs?
Neo, I am in complete agreement about dry cleaning. I have a job where I must occasionally wear a suit — though fortunately not very often — so I haven’t been able to eschew it entirely. But I have all the suits I am ever going to need, and will never buy anything that has to be dry cleaned again.
Estoy Listo on September 21, 2019 at 11:59 pm said:
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
* * *
The moving on is not the problem: it’s the coming back, erasing, and rewriting that’s the problem.
On laundry and dry-cleaning:
I found a good list of the symbols, printed it out, and taped it to my washing machine. Sadly, of course, some manufacturers use different variants of some of the symbols. I tend to have only a few things that can’t be done in low-temp wash and low-medium dryer. If something claims to be hand-wash only I put it in a large mesh bag and use the gentle cycle. If it needs to be dried flat or hung (or anything unusual), I wash it in a mesh bag so I know not to toss it in the dryer.
A lot of things that want special treatment don’t really need it, but you have to be careful, especially if expensive. Rayon is a problem.
I get a lot of nice clothes at thrift stores and don’t really care that much if they don’t survive being treated like the rest of the washing.
I buy dry-cleaning sheets at my grocery store that are used in one’s own dryer. Dryel comes with a large bag to put your items in; Woolite does not. Works out to about $2 for each load of 3-6 items (depending mostly on weight and fabric).
They seem to work okay; the sheets come out kind of greyish at the end, and the clothes at least smell fresh. Won’t do leather, suede, and some other materials.
Pretreat anything that is actually soiled as opposed to just “worn 7 times to the office and looking limp.”
Ha ha, Neo! I could have written this twenty years ago.
I had been driving used GM cars and finally got a newer model. Instead of easy labels like “heat” and “defrost,” everything had a symbol. But at least the locations were the same. Then I bought a Saturn, which had different symbols. As an added bonus, the buttons and their locations were slightly different because of a dashboard change.
So there I was, driving, and I hit the defrost. (A snowflake symbol.) The windshield grew WORSE and the car was getting cold. Yes, the snowflake was for A/C.
There is ONE symbol that bugs me more than any other: the one my car uses to tell me my headlights are on. It at least I THINK that’s what it’s telling me. I have an “auto” setting for my lights and that’s what I keep them on pretty much all the time, but the little “two lights beaming in opposite directions” symbol that illuminates on my dash when I start my car at night baffles me when I have recently driven my husband’s car. The reason: my husband’s headlights make the road ahead comfortably bright. My headlights – it often seems as if I’m driving by streetlight alone, or possibly fog/running lights, and so I think for the moment that maybe that’s what the symbol means.
So then I flick through the non-automatic settings on my lights, different symbols pop up (none of them meaningful to me), and I reluctantly conclude that it’s got to be my headlight positioning that makes me doubt that the lights are on. You’d think after owning the car for six years, I’d have more confidence (or look up the symbol, just to be sure).
Just because that’s what the people who design these updates like to do?
Look on the back of your dollar bill. The pyramid Eye of Horus.
The Deep State and those who ape the higher echelons, tend to like symbology as it transmits more information faster. But it also indoctrinates faster via mind control.
It is why driving tests have you read signs.
Of course it is annoying. It always is when one mental system tries to absorb or inter act with another one that is incompatible.
They should have kept Brandon Eich around.
He went and created Brave, with its ad free protocols.
I am using it now.
So the mobile-friendly design mocks and wireframes get delivered to the Devs, who then come back with questions about platform-specific quirks. The desired end result is parity, or near-parity across all devices.
I’ve seen this happen with Console games that get ported to PC as well. Only recently has anybody apparently figured out how to “port” over a control scheme that works as well with mouse/keyboard as with a controller.
And I suspect you’ve seen this change, if you think about it. Remember when most websites had a navigation bar down the left side, with many stacked buttons there, plus a few across the top? Now think how many of them have gone to a few buttons on the top, nothing much on the left save perhaps some Social Share buttons (Facebook, etc.), and then: Ta-Da! a “hamburger menu.” (That’s the menu with the 3 stacked lines as its icon.)
I will make the prediction that when this trends hits crit max down slope fall to oblivion, somebody will make an open source hack that hacks (not cracks, that is a different thing) through a UI and customizes it entirely based upon a virtual box type design (Dox/linux box). An overlay that replaces the current UI with code specifically designed to allow people to drag around their UI elements and input in stuff they want, like widgets.
This is the ultimate customization experience and has been enjoyed by PC hackers and code users for quite some time. If we don’t like something in a game, we hack and cheat through it. Or mod it and re design it. Or backwards engineer it and then use the code for something like Space station 13 (Goons and Something Awful website history).
she told me… no, we are going to set the new standard..
hard to look at people who are seriously thinking they can wander in
re-designate keys
and that thousand other sites would be forced to scramble their keys to keep up with this forward thinker
this was what was better in business i was told..
(Where is my edit function, that thing needs to be here to keep Ymar in slim shape)
First thing I do when I get a new game is to reconfigure the controls. I have my own design protocols for UI. Games are no fun if I have to use WASD to move around ,when I type ESDF.
Jamie:
There’s a symbol that indicates the car lights are on???
My car has so many graphics and symbols that I tend to ignore all but a few that I’ve learned matter. One that’s iffy is something that looks to me like a faucet (but how could it be a faucet? No faucets in cars, right?) but helpfully uses words to tell me it means “check engine.” Then when I look in the manual I find it can mean any number of things, some innocuous and some meaningful.
Conan the Carbarian was an interface designer.
“Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women!”