The portion of the book “The icon book,” pp. 13-16.

Icons are controversial. If you spend much time talking to programmers, graphic designers, and computer users or you read the pontifical editorials in many of the computer magazines and newsletters, you will get many opinions about icons. Many of these ideas are wrong. Before we delve into how to design icons, perhaps we should clear away the poppycock, balderdash, and pure baloney that passes for proven fact.

Icons totally replace words

If you use icons in a user interface, you cannot and should not use words too.

Icons and words are not enemies. They are not mutually exclusive. In certain places each is needed. Most of the time, a careful combination of a well-designed icon and a succinctly phrased word label outperform either alone.

All-or-nothing designers miss opportunities to have the best of both words and icons. Word labels help users learn visual images initially, and the visual images help poor readers interpret word labels.

Icons are no better than words

Operating a computer by manipulating icons is so awkward and inefficient that iconic interfaces are just a fad.

Many computer users and programmers learned to operate a computer through a command-line interface that required remembering complex commands and typing them in. Often these users cannot imagine why others would rather do their work by pointing to silly little pictures. Such a response is natural. Once we have learned how to do something well, we find all alternative procedures awkward and inefficient. This is especially true if we have invested considerable time in acquiring knowledge and skills that do not transfer to the alternative procedure.

Another common objection to iconic interfaces is that they are hopelessly inefficient. Critics often point out how much more time it takes to shove icons around the screen than to press a function key. The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the time required to learn which function key to press, the time required to remember or look up which function key to press, and the time to correct a mistake made when the wrong key is pressed. When users have to learn a new program monthly and must use several different programs daily, iconic interfaces may be considerably more productive than remember-and-type interfaces.

Again it is not an either-or choice. Why not give users commands, menus, and icons and let them pick the style of interaction that best suits their needs?

Icons make products easier to uses

To make a product easy to use, all you have to do is replace the words in commands and menus with icons.

Icons do not by themselves make a computer easier to use. Poorly designed or deployed icons may do just the opposite. Obscure icons make computer screens look like the control panel of an alien spaceship. Gaudy, garish icons make them look like a piece of “refrigerator art.”

Icons do not make a product easier to use. Good design does.

Icons must be perfectly obvious

Reject any icon that is not immediately obvious to everyone everywhere every time.

Obvious icons are better than obscure ones, but there is more to good icons than instant recognition. In fact, making an icon immediately obvious to everyone may be such an elusive goal that by fixating on it, we obscure the system as a whole.

Some concepts are inherently difficult to understand – whether we represent them with icons or with words. For such concepts, the issue is not whether icons require study but whether they require less or more study than equivalent word labels.

An icon does not fail if it requires a few seconds of study the first time the user sees it. Provided users are not totally stumped by an icon, the process of figuring out its meaning adds an enjoyable challenge to learning the system. Watch users when they decode an icon. They smile.

This process of decoding an icon actively engages the user and helps the user remember the icon so that recognition is almost instant the next time. This instant recognition may be much more important than the initial delay, especially if the user will encounter the icon dozens or even hundreds of times.

Icons are pictures

The best icons are realistic, postage-stamp sized illustrations.

Icons are not pictures. We do not look at them to see what something looks like. In fact, if we have to look at them closely, they are probably not well designed. Icons are meant to be viewed entirely in a single glance and, once learned, recognized automatically. Overloading an icon with realistic detail may render it less rather than more recognizable.

Designing icons is pure art

Designing icons is a form of artistic self-expression. Beauty is in the eye of the artist.

No one would suggest using an ugly icon when an attractive one would work just as well. Many illustrators, however, compromise or even defeat the effectiveness of icons by considering only the aesthetics of the image. In technical icons, form must follow function, and when it does, the results are usually pleasing to the eye. When function is ignored and icons are used merely to decorate, viewers are frustrated, bored, or insulted.