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.)

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

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

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.

Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.

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 think visual signs are an amazing way to impart immediate information at a glance. Take road signs for example, at speed I can know what to expect around the corner.

However it is another language to learn and as such needs standardisation to be useful. If I go to another country and start driving the road symbols mean something else.

Its the same in the GUI. The symbols should allow me to move quicker around the interface, even if I've not used the software before.

The issues I see are each OS/App can, and does, use their own symbols for the same functionality (sure there are some universals like cut/copy/paste). And like the article these symbols now appear to be getting used as bullet points, so each item needs it's bullet points.

In my opinion, and like the greyed out keyboard shortcuts over to the right of some menu items, these symbols should only be there when they denote actions that can be done by clicking a button. They should be imparting the mouse equivalent or those keyboard shortcuts, a way to navigate and do actions; not as some decoration. Imparting the language of the GUI.

So yeah I agree with the article. Function over design aesthetic every time.

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?

The UI/UX design is not about standards and guidelines but about what the manager currently likes. There is no discipline because senior managers don't care until Excel cells turn red.

Steve Jobs was forcing design discipline across Apple products with furious determination because he actually cared.

That's how it ends, everything becomes an unmanageable, constantly changing mess because every manager likes something else and big firms are rotating their personnel every 3 years.

Because the above products of the same company are losing cohesion and consistency even if they are in the same product line which results in bad UX.

Design departments are not disciplined enough...

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.

Slightly off topic, or at least tangential, Zapier has one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces I have seen in a while. When you log in, they have a left hand toolbar that runs down vertically, and it is icon only. I understand why they do this, being on the left hand side you don't want to take up much space. But unlike other user interfaces that employ this type of toolbar, you CAN'T see what each item is by expanding the toolbar or even hovering over the item! The only way to see what each one is is to click on it. This is a pinnacle of terrible UX. I love Zapier, but it makes me question their product offering if they can get this so wrong.

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.

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.

100% disagree. They make finding a group of commands very quickly and it's not like horizontal space in menu is at the premium

I wouldn't have an issue with every menu item having an icon, if we could make every single one different enough to be distinguishable from the others.

The problem is that you only have so many ways to draw the shapes and at your average resolution it ends up looking like "this group of squares with squiggles in them" and "this other group of circles with squiggles in them".

In some cases like a power menu or window snapping menu (like in the Mac Rectangle app) they can be insanely useful, though maybe those are easy to do because the count is kept to a reasonable amount. Maybe there are exceptions where the same icon can be used for multiple items, like in the insert/delete action groupings, to make the group distinguishable from the other options.

But in general, it just seems like the menus have perhaps too many items in them.

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.

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.

In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.

He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?

I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!

I'm bracing myself for losing ellipses in Apple's menus too.

At least based on the trajectory of macOS's design decline.

For those who might not be aware, a long-standing design pattern on macOS is for menu item labels to have a "..." at the end when a click will take you somewhere, rather than taking immediate action. So you can click more confidently.

It's an example of the subtle quality and attention to detail you get with native UI, that gets lost when you build a web app and re-invent the wheel.

Most "web" UIs don't include this detail, as evidences by the screenshots in the article.

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.

Personally, I don’t like to use icons in menus. I do like them in tab bars and toolbars. I’ve learned (the hard way) to be sparing about using icons. Way back in the 1990s, I designed a scanner driver plugin that used an almost purely iconic interface. Looked great. At the time, I was gaga over Kai’s Power Tools[0].

Our customers hated it, and it was quickly taken behind the woodshed, and buried in a shallow grave in the desert.

Icons are really difficult.

Designing icons is really hard. They need to be immediately recognizable, when very small, and also, retain coherence, when made very large. They need to be recognizable, when displayed as transparent, monochrome templates, and they need to be culturally relevant.

In some cases, there may be legal ramifications for icon choices. For example, branding. I remember someone complaining about Apple rejecting their app submission, because they changed the tint of the Sign in with Apple button to match their color theme.

Selecting from a set (like SF Symbols) takes a lot of thought. I have to be careful not to use one that is already a common icon for something other than the feature I’m attaching it to. I often see apps that make weird choices.

One of the apps I wrote, uses a “long press to learn more” feature. If you long-press on almost any item in a screen, you get a haptic, and a small popover appears, displaying the accessibility label and hint. Works nicely. Ensures that I have good accessibility support, doesn’t interfere with other gestures, and also forces me to be thoughtful about accessibility text.

Kind of a pain to implement and maintain, though. I don’t do it in most of my apps.

[0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html

I really dislike how minimalism took over the world. The brain is pretty awesome and more information does not always equate to longer processing time. Sometimes more is simply more.

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.

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.

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 think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.

A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.

A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.

> "Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset. Interesting…again I wonder what the rationale is here? How do you choose? It’s not clear to me."

The rationale is clear, they are choosing to use icons only when a widely-recognized icon is available. This makes sense, and it answers the author's concerns perfectly about icons being used arbitrarily when they don't convey anything.

To be honest I find the whole motion of this blog post quite confusing. The user starts with a bad example, people using icons randomly that nobody could recognize without the text, which is evidence of the fact that the icon itself doesn't convey much information.

Then he shows an example where someone doesn't do the thing he complained about, they actually did use icons with a rationale. At which point he asks the question, "What is the rationale" but does not actually attempt to answer it..

To me though, there is a much more interesting paradox beneath all this. If we grant that it only makes sense to show an icon when it's meaning is widely known. How are new icons ever going to be introduced? Presumably every well known went through a period where it was used with text because it was still not well known. So while it might be bad UX to use an icon that is unfamiliar to users, over the long term using such icons has the benefit of creating a shared visual language that we all understand. I guess the litmus test for when to put an icon should then become: Is this functionality widespread enough in other applications that I can imagine this icon becoming standard in the future?

I'd suggest a simple test: remix menu items and icons and test, if this has significant impact on usability. If not, the icons are just arbitrary decoration and ultimately add clutter.

Referring to the examples provided in the article, I'd suggest that the impact on the Safari app menu should be minimal (so these are non-functional icons), while the impact on the Move & Resize submenu would be devastating and should result in confusion (so these are essential).

If you can remix with minimal impact, don't do icons. (In the case of the app menu, these are apparently meant to add structure, which is already established by other means like menu separators, so you have now two – or, including indentation, three – systems of structure and visual hierarchy that are fighting each other.)

Moreover, if you put icons everywhere, you're forgoing the facility to convey state, like active state checkmarks, since these, instead of standing out and signalling change, would be just drowned in the decorative clutter. (So what's next? Add color and/or animation, like swirling checkmarks?) And this, BTW, is also why the icons in the Move & Resize menu are effective: they are conveying and illustrating state (in terms of a preview), while most of the other menu icons (mostly referring to activities) do not. So, as a rule of thumb: icons referring to state may be useful and even desirable, while icons referring to activities are probably better left out. (And, if you feel the need for something like bullet points to mark your most important menu items, there's probably a deeper problem with your menu structure.)

The first Google example is a nice one: You could have only one icon for each group (one trash for all the 'delete' actions', one share icon for all the 'share / download' actions, etc). That would be really helpful, for what it is worth.

Globally, I had a pleasant time reading this article which was way too dedicated to something that is almost invisible in its current state (ie: I don't notice those icons and surely think they aren't _that_ helpful for any type of user unless used in a rare way).

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).

I don't understand why removing menu icons is a good thing. Firefox did it and I absolutely hate the change: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2021/06/content-design-considera...

I actually use Zen browser and thankfully someone made a "mod" to bring them back: https://github.com/SivanTechDev/zen-themes/tree/main/BringBa...

Maybe it's just me, but the icons are NOT noise or a distraction, they actually make it quicker and easier for me to find what I want. Yes, I can read the words, but sometimes things blend together, such as "unload tab" and "unpin tab". The icons make it easier to tell them apart. Also, again maybe just me, but I remember the icon for the action I want and it's much quicker for me to scan the menu to find the icon than to have to read every piece of text.

Anyway, lots of people don't like the removal of icons, me being one of them, and I think the icons are nice and should stay in the menus.

Maybe im a weirdo and maybe I'll get dowvoted... But I only feel gratitude to the UI designers and the digital artists that they only think how to make it better for the user both in terms of creating a communication that uses less symbols per word and a more pleasent view for our eyes.

I also learned here that no matter your intentions and how much good you are going to do,and how many people like it, you always find someone not confortable (with his right point of view).

The fact that millions of users and millions of designers choose this style,for a long period of time now, it means that for most of them it make sense.

(Sometimes millions of users are screw up by bad designs, but usually is for a short period and by a handful of developers).

Things that consume energy and don't help life don't have a long life, that's what we learnt in biology.

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.

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.

I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:

> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.

I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.

You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.

Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.

> Send help.

If modern developers were able of accepting help, we wouldn't be in this bad situation in the first place.

I looked at the Safari screenshots. The entry text behind the icons is misaligned.

Menus in KDE show how it's done correctly, entry text is aligned on one vertical axis, then icons if present on another, then checkboxes if present on another. With opposite alignment, key shortcuts are aligned to one axis, then arrows disclosing submenus on another. (GTK gets that last part wrong.)

>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.

This is what the Windows Vista/7-era UX guidelines say/said on on the matter:

Consider providing menu item icons for:

- The most commonly used menu items.

- Menu items whose icon is standard and well known.

- Menu items whose icon well illustrates what the command does.

If you use icons, don't feel obligated to provide them for all menu items. Cryptic icons aren't helpful, create visual clutter, and prevent users from focusing on the important menu items.

From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-...

Interesting take. As a low vision person, the icons help me scan menus like this.

I don't know if it's something with me or with some larger population, but I find it very difficult/tedious/debilitating to navigate menu-lists with more than 5-6 items. If your menu is more than that (and in the examples its up to 20) I highly encourage anyone building a UI to add nice descriptive icons. Thank you.

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...

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)

One thing that I think is demonstrated in the Safari "file" menu, the most common things you might need under that menu* have icons, which means you can scan to them very quickly.

* Note here that most common things you need under the menu are not the same as the most commonly used commands. New tab and new window are surely the most commonly used commands, but those you would almost never go to the menu for.

This problem only shows that these corporations can't see beyond their own nose. Yes modern GTK is crap, but in GTK+ 2, there is a global per-user setting, whether you prefer only icons, icons and text or only text. All native applications respect it, because it is of course handled in the UI toolkit. I expect QT to be the same, this is typically even more configurable. QT and GTK+ also have interop for such settings.

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 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.

I don't feel that this is clutter. It's actually helpful to quickly locate the spot you're looking for, or understand the purpose of something better without having to know exactly what it does. Listing text with separators and nothing else makes the experience worse unless it's already obvious where's-what.

In terms of accessibility, too, icons are a win. Colors on top of this also help with that.

The general point holds - there is no universal solution, to some people some icons will be noise, to some the same icons will be instant visual parsing replacing reading, so the solution is obvious - easy user customization (ideally at an OS level where every single File-Open menu action can only be renamed/icon-added/removed / keyboard shortcut changed). But that's just a dream

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.

I think the best approach is to separate between frequent and rare actions. Frequent actions like cut, copy, and paste usually have recognizable icons that allow people to scan them easily when in need. Rare actions should use text only to prevent noise. Having an icon (which is most likely not as recognizable as the frequent actions) won't help

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?

You're lucky they still have text labels!

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.

Seems like something that could be a UI setting per user.

Only text/Only icons/Only icons (with tooltips)/Some icons with text

I like them, for whatever reason icons are a good thing for me.

I believe different people literally see the world different and there should be an option to remove icons if they prefer this way. It used to be this option at least in some programs.

But of course this person doesn't like it, and it wants everyone to follow his taste.

I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.

I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.

Back in the day MS office applications had toolbars (instead of ribbon)

Toolbars could be customized. You could select any item from any menu and place it on toolbar for quick access. So unique icons for every menu option were useful.

Even now i think MS office has a quick access toolbar on top that can be customized that way. Tad limited.

putting aside accessibility, I believe that the usefulness of icons boils down to brain efficiency.

Considering that the brain has hard-wired neurons (since birth) to automatically count/recognize up to 3 objects, we need some icons as anchor points. With emphasis on some.

You can have max of 3 icons in a row, and a max distance of 6 items without icons.

Then you can VERY quickly find any menu item, by doing "+/-3 from X anchor" math, which your brain does extremely efficiently.

Further, this means that an action is represented by a relative path (e. g. save as = 1 down from the save icon). This further helps the brain to store these associations, because it's also extremely efficient at storing relative paths. So, long time users automatically become more and more efficient at using your software.

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).

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.

Very cool analysis, I never thought of that. I was actually in the camp of "icons everywhere" because it seemed inconsistent to have icons only sometimes, but I never stopped to look at indentation especially when mixing in checkmarks, thanks for sharing!

I certainly try to add icons some places assuming it is faster that way.

Having said that most of the time I discover ... there's not a great icon and it's not faster / I just don't.

I find these kinds of decisions pretty dang hard really.

Off topic but I could use some help here - what icon would you use for "prevent screen for sleeping" toggle button? I thought about an eye (open or closed if it's on or off), but I think there's a better option I can't see

I love it for quickly finding items.

On mobile, there's a small menu to different site sections at the bottom of the screen. You'll never guess what that menu includes.

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).

I have sent them one of these

https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/565/565524.png

Don't agree with this take - it's quick to scan for the delete icon.

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.

Ё-моё, this is really bad, I am so glad that I never upgraded to Tahoe.

Can we just stop endless design churn and resists urge to innovate in a fashion industry manner in software UI ? This is ridiculous.

And f. the product managers that pushing for this, f. the SIP, lets reverse engineer the crap out of this and reverse all this changes with easy to use system level patch.

Windows 95 really was peak UI.

IIRC that standard was to put the toolbar icon next to any menu item that was also a toolbar button. Otherwise, don't put one.

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.

His example of great icons from Finder is stolen directly from the Rectangle app. Looks like Apple shamelessly took Rectangle's icons.

mixed bag of reactions :

- the part where the reader is invited to guess what a menu item does based on the icon alone was very interesting

- how come the floppy disk survived as as "save" icon when floppy disk use is not the default save medium ?

- has there been any global study (dis)proving that icons and emojis are truly understood and carry the same meaning everywhere on the planet ?

They are fast to find. It's functional to have something rather than nothing there.

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

Designers insist on "consistency", meaning if something applies in one place, it must apply in every place.

This is misguided.

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.

People are saying they miss Steve Jobs but they probably just miss the product having actual direction.

Disagree entirely, pictographs are easier to recognize than text descriptions of features and functions.

Do we even need menus? They are good for feature discovery, but could be replaced by a search!?

This blog post was written by someone who speaks/reads english as a first language.

My best guess for the sparse icons in older MacOS versions: icons only for frequently-used menu items.

Emojis in comments, terminal logs, git commits, documentations, everywhere… Send help

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.

Perhaps we are witnessing a early shift toward ideographic writing

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.

Thank you for writing this! Ever since Tahoe, I've felt EXACTLY the same... Just seems like the left hand not talking to the right hand at Apple, just another sign of failing leadership and lack of coordination between teams. Let's hope they fix this nonsense. Or at minimum, add a setting to disable this gratuity on menus.

Look how they massacred my boy

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.

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?

Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me.

Deal with it.

I like them

I like it.

[flagged]

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.