Current thread on the predecessor post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381768" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381768</a>
Unfortunately, it's quite hard to use common sense at large companies. The incentives aren't there, and for every one person who "gets it" there are nine that don't - and they will be your review committee / peer reviewers / project partners.
I had an icon design for this that I created last month:<p>Archive (a box with a label tag on it, <a href="https://www.storagegiant.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/a3-archive-box.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.storagegiant.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/a3-archive...</a> from the frontside)
Unarchive (same box, but the lid is slightly tilted open)<p>You know why it works? Because the button also has the text on it that says 'Archive' or 'Retrieve' and the interface actions change accordingly on whether the resource is archived or not.<p>It's not about iconography, it's about ever increasing loss of context through simplification. It's the curse of the modern UI/UX designer.
When you tell a company that your design is too obfuscated and you're also a Perl hacker is like: the biggest burn I could possibly think of. Chapeau mjd.
Two things:<p>(1) Designing icons that work for a product that's used by billions is really hard. you have to deal not just with how it looks, but how people will see it across different languages, disciplines, experience, and so on. It's practically impossible to do it "right" and to satisfy everyone.<p>(2) I bet you given #1, the idea here isn't to design an icon that works, but to create a placeholder for a position in the UI, and then train you to click in that general direction. That's why two icons are on the opposite ends of the navigation bar. They know those two are confusing, but they just want you to remember (<- go this way to do X, and go -> that way to do Y).
Mate, its very obvious.<p>So obvious in fact, that they removed the text labels.
So insanely obvious that it made sense to reduce the size of the icons to like 20px x 20px.
So inexplicably obvious that they chose two basically identical icons to convey the message.<p>So obvious!
As a designer, an actual likely answer:<p>These are standard material design icons. Most likely someone needed to add a new button/feature and just picked whatever icon best fit the purpose, or someone designed a new icon that would fit the purpose of whatever feature/button was being added.<p>With huge apps like Gmail, there's likely just so many different things happening that there's no time allocated to check every small change in a broader context, and these kinds of things slip in and pile up.<p>Over time, more and more "small" things pile up, and eventually a redesign is necessary because the palette has been polluted with too many things and the software becomes too clunky.<p>Another option is that no designer even gave this a look, or they saw it too late. This happens often too, designers might be busy working on a big new design and an engineer needs to just put in a button and doesn't think twice about just using one of the icons from the icon library.<p>Incompetence can explain stuff sometimes, but just like engineering, design is also often a collection of compromises and sometimes a lot of compromises can collude together to form a bigger disaster. The call icon is a good example of this. It's constrained by a lot of things, like overall language rules of material design, and any prior interface design choices made about button styles, toggles, etc. If the designer came up with a totally new style of button, they'd also be scolded by their peers for not maintaining consistency.<p>All of that said, I'm not making excuses, I'm providing an explanation. I think overall, with any kind of iconography based interactions, when in doubt, add a label. It just works. Icons are abstractions of language and actions, when it's no longer clear what they are abstracting, it's time to use language. It really is that simple.
I feel like the archive one is easy to fix.<p>This is MS Outlook's and MacOS's archive button - <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Csjpgth.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Csjpgth.png</a> - if you can't see that, it's a filing cardboard box with it's oversized lid fit on top.<p>I use MS Outlook web UI and exchange on MacOS with an Apple mail client.<p>Also then by 'fixing' the archive one to this better one, you sort of also fix the 'Move to Inbox' icon because it's not so similar. The 'Move to Inbox' isn't to bad if it's by itself, what makes it bad as the author says is it's context. I'm not sure what a better 'Move to Inbox' icon would be, I'm not a skilled icon designer.
This reminded me of a thing I had written <i>7 years ago</i> about Gmail being a usability nightmare.<p><a href="https://sean-mcbeth.tumblr.com/post/77384411853/gmail-is-a-usability-nightmare" rel="nofollow">https://sean-mcbeth.tumblr.com/post/77384411853/gmail-is-a-u...</a><p>The TL;DR is: Gmail has a number of modifier-less keyboard shortcuts that can hide messages and dismiss the notification the message has been hidden faster then you can notice if you are typing fast and accidentally lose GUI focus on the message editor area.<p>Email clients are not video games. The keyboard commands should require modifiers.
Mirror: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Nvc70k1.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Nvc70k1.png</a><p>gmail2.png still wont load but he's circled it at least in the 2nd image.
Icons are a bad idea. Words for short commands work better. In the olden days some UIs let you hide icon images and display the alt text instead. Those were very good UIs.
If you think Gmail's bad, check out Google Analytics icons:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/thomashpark/status/1005090263499530240" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/thomashpark/status/1005090263499530240</a>
From the help:<p>1. Open Gmail.<p>2. In the top right, click Settings and then <i>See all settings</i>.<p>3. Scroll down to the "Button labels" section.<p>4. Select <i>Text</i>.<p>5. At the bottom of the page, click <i>Save changes</i>.<p>The text also has the benefit of making the buttons much bigger / easier to click.
I've seen at least two different sets of icons in Gmail in the past month. It was very confusing. Why do they keep change? The ones in the OP look different from the ones in my gmail.
google has so poor standards, but what is worse those standards become general and other companies are copying them because its the great google doing it
IMO, The best UX ever made is the book. It invented bookmarks first over 1500 years ago. The cover contains the topic, the author. The first page tells you when and where it was published and who inspired it. The contents page tells you the all contents. The index states the topics. The page numbers illustrates where one is and how far they have to go before it's over. Finally, it's UX is so good it hasn't that many updates since Pliny the Elder. <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/page-numbers-where-did-they-come-from-and-are-they-even-useful-anymore.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/page-numbers-where-...</a>
It's ironic that I can't even see what the author is complaining about. At first, the site wouldn't load at all, but now I merely can't load the images.<p>Perhaps it's a kind of performance art, and I'm missing the point: that things are harder than we might naively assume at first glance?