I’ve been thinking about software icons lately. Icons are intended to help us work faster by being easy to recognize, recall, and scan. Other reasons for using icons are to save space and reduce translation costs. At least that’s what William Horton wrote in The Icon Book1 in 1994.
His logic made sense to me at the time and it still does. But I’m not seeing his vision of icon use in the software I use today. What I see are a lot of unrecognizable icons, icons that have multiple meanings, and icons with labels.
My favourite nonsensical icon made perfect sense twenty years ago when Horton wrote his book. At the time, and for years later, everyone knew exactly what this was. 
Many of us remember using this device years ago to save our work. True, we all know what the icon represents, but what 20 year old has ever actually seen one that isn’t in a museum?
That’s the problem with using an image of a 3.5 inch diskette to indicate save. An icon’s purpose must be immediately recognizable to everyone. If you have to explain what it is to children, it’s not doing its job.
Next on my hit list, 
. Its meaning often depends on the software. For example, if you’re writing a blog post in the WordPress web app, it means to search within the blog you’re logged into. If you’re writing your blog in Word, it means to zoom or magnify the page. What if you need to search something in Word? Look for something that looks like 
.
Because there’s no standard for software icons, new users can’t be certain what the search icon looks like in any given application. They might know that it will be either a magnifying glass or binoculars. Both make sense, but having to think about it, scan for two icons, and then remember which is which slows learning.
Occasionally, software designers use similar icons for search and zoom in the same software application. Take Paint Shop Pro, for example. The Manage tab has a magnifying glass icon to search for images. On the Adjust and Edit tabs, similar icons indicate zoom in 
and zoom out 
. The icons are different enough that there is no mistaking zoom in and out for search. But it is possible to mistake search for zoom.
Sometimes, software companies decide that they want to stand out in the crowd so they redesign common icons. When they do, they are forgetting one of the most important rules of product design, Don’t make the user think.
This icon is from Evernote. 
Looking at it, you probably don’t recognize it as the share icon. That’s because almost everyone else uses this icon. 
It gets worse. This is the icon Evernote and the rest of the world uses for synchronize. 
Look familiar? Fortunately the share icon is labeled in Evernote but that defeats the purpose of using icons. Keeping in mind Horton’s book, the purpose of icons is to save space and reduce translation costs.
I could go on describing poor icon use in software but my husband pointed out that the problem isn’t limited to software. Everyday objects use some very cryptic icons. For example, do you know what the laundry symbols on your clothes mean? I don’t. I depend completely on the text that appears underneath the symbols.
Just for fun, I started looking for icons around the house. I realized that the only reason I could recognize the self-clean icon on the oven was that I eliminated all the others. I regularly use our PS3 to watch DVDs and stream media but I can never remember the meaning of the triangle, square, and circle icons. It took a very long time for me to remember what the X does.
As technical writers, perhaps we should start taking some responsibility for the icons that appear in the software and on the products we work on. Everyday, we put ourselves in the place of users so we can anticipate their needs and questions. If an icon looks goofy to us, we should be speaking up. If it’s so cryptic that it needs a label, we should point out the disadvantages of labels. If an icon image is obsolete, maybe it’s time to think of something else.
Change won’t happen over night. But if we truly see ourselves as user advocates, we should at least try.
1Horton, William The Icon Book, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1994
Outside the box 