I remember having a conversation years ago when I worked on the DB Learning Manager and DB Primary project whereby we discussed at length the visual relevance of commonly used icons in interface design. These icons usually started life in common operating systems like Windows or Mac OS or within widely used software like Microsoft Windows and have then become the default choice since.
As we rapidly move forward with the way we access and create content on a number of devices and in a number of different ways, these icons become even less relevant but somehow we just know what they mean. Any attempt to re-design them to bring them up-to-date only causes confusion for the user but how do we explain in hundreds of years time what these icons actually mean and why they are used – it’s hard enough now.
Search
The magnifying glass is commonly used in user interface design to represent search, unless of course you are working with design software and in that case its used as a tool to let you look more closely at something.
Find
This icon is often used to represent the ‘Find’ action when searching for a word or term within a page.
Telephone
Ok, look around you right now at this very moment for a telephone – Does it look like this?
Record Sound
When was the last time you used a standalone microphone to record a sound and did it look like this?
Choose Colour
Not quite so common but still used as an icon to represent choosing a colour. Last time you used one of these was at art college.
Announce
Have you ever used a loudspeaker to make an announcement?
Movie
We know film strips are still used at the cinema but you never see it.
Television
Televisions don’t look like this anymore but it’s still widely recognised.
Think of the kids
There will come a time when we will need to explain ourselves to our children and our children’s children as to why we use these icons. When home computers were becoming more widely used and graphical user interfaces were introduced, icons had to be designed for a different generation of user and it was this generation of user that had no starting point except for the actual representation of that icon. I can only imagine that when we come to the ‘Search’, ‘Find’ and ‘Zoom’ argument that explanations will be thin on the ground.
Thanks Glyphish (for the icons).