I think anyone who has had to make a dense UI work on mobile has felt the allure of using icons as a substitute for text. It’s practically encouraged by the material guidelines.
You will spend weeks/months (sigh, years) agonising over the six icons you can lay horizontally over a bottom toolbar in a mobile layout, only to sit down and guide a user a user through your UI and realise how monumental stupid and unfriendly your UI is.
I was guiding my boss through some features “ok, just click the view you want in the bottom toolbar”, “um? Which button do I click for a forward view?”. This is someone who knew our product capabilities inside out and helped debug users on a daily basis. I felt even stupider having to geometrically describe the details of the icon, realising how stupid of a UX this was, just to continue with the demo.
I scrapped the entire thing for a textual status toolbar that when you click brings up a drawer with every option in plain English. The only icons were a tickbox next to the currently selected item in a drop down menu. News flash, turns out people can read, and much faster than they can interpret abstract icons.
The next time I did a demo, not only did I feel the immense relief not having to sweat over “describing what icon to click”, didn’t have to worry about flicking through icon catalogs to find the “perfect, vaguely connected icon to the idea I’m trying to convey”.
Turns out VIM was right all along, model UI is king. Don’t get me wrong, 20 years of mobile UI has beaten some visual language into is, but it is no substitute for actual language.
You will spend weeks/months (sigh, years) agonising over the six icons you can lay horizontally over a bottom toolbar in a mobile layout, only to sit down and guide a user a user through your UI and realise how monumental stupid and unfriendly your UI is.
I was guiding my boss through some features “ok, just click the view you want in the bottom toolbar”, “um? Which button do I click for a forward view?”. This is someone who knew our product capabilities inside out and helped debug users on a daily basis. I felt even stupider having to geometrically describe the details of the icon, realising how stupid of a UX this was, just to continue with the demo.
I scrapped the entire thing for a textual status toolbar that when you click brings up a drawer with every option in plain English. The only icons were a tickbox next to the currently selected item in a drop down menu. News flash, turns out people can read, and much faster than they can interpret abstract icons.
The next time I did a demo, not only did I feel the immense relief not having to sweat over “describing what icon to click”, didn’t have to worry about flicking through icon catalogs to find the “perfect, vaguely connected icon to the idea I’m trying to convey”.
Turns out VIM was right all along, model UI is king. Don’t get me wrong, 20 years of mobile UI has beaten some visual language into is, but it is no substitute for actual language.