> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts.
There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Case in point – telling a young kid how to answer a call on the iPhone: press the green banana button.
> Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Does that really matter? A perfect case in point was the old Pages icon in OS X: a quill pen in front of a cup of ink. Do you know any person who has ever used a pen like that in real life? Have you ever even seen a pen like that? I'm willing to guess not. But everyone still recognized the contents of that icon, and correctly inferred that the app was for writing things.
Furthermore, the use of ye olde imagery in that icon was playful, like the app was inviting you to an older time when writing was simpler and you could just focus on your words. The app was aiming for that kind of simplicity too. The use of way outdated imagery in the icon did not prevent Apple from conveying deep meaning to a modern audience. If anything, it enhanced the point they were trying to make with that icon.
I'd argue that the quill pen was a special case. As you point out, it was an intentional anachronism to communicate a certain point. This was not the case with, e.g., the floppy disk, the notepad, the contacts book, etc. Everyone knew what the quill pen was because it was still frequently seen in portrayals of the olden days when it was used; even today, portrayals of Victorian England in Doctor Who or Revolutionary America in Hamilton inevitably show a few quill pens in use. But the reason people recognized floppy disks, contact books, and notepads was because they were still in active use at the time.
You point out that while the quill pen was long outdated when it was first used, "everyone still recognized the contents of that icon", but that's exactly the problem that the GP and GGP are pointing out: more and more of the old skeuomorphic icons reference real world icons that younger users (and indeed some older users) actually don't recognize. Notepads, sure, we've still got those; contact books, eh, you'll see them once in a while, but tbh when I see a bare "contact book" icon without a label it occasionally takes me a second to figure out what I'm looking at; floppy disks, as has been argued to death, are entirely a thing of the past, with the exception of old systems and archives still in use in dusty university basements. Young users today essentially just know the image of a floppy disc as "the save button" without any skeuomorphic rationale backing it up.
The skeuomorphic link between computers and the physical objects we use is is constantly degrading, to the point that using skeuo icons can sometimes actually inhibit the user experience and slow the user down while they try to figure out what they're looking at. We have common patterns emerging with no or very little connection to the real world; a great example would the "hamburger" menu button. If there's any metaphor there in the user's mind, it's to the row items that will appear when you click on it, not to anything physical, yet it's perfectly comprehensible to anyone who's been using digital devices for any length of time.
> Young users today essentially just know the image of a floppy disc as "the save button" without any skeuomorphic rationale backing it up.
Yeah, but so what? It is, nevertheless, recognizable to nearly everyone. In a world where cars still advertise their "horsepower" and pencils have graphite compound "leads" we can probably live with an icon that is well understood but whose original referent is no longer familiar.
The icon is recognizable because younger people learn the weird boxy icon means save. Even with an explanation of the icon's origins, for the younger generation, the icon is recognizable but not meaningful. Can we devise a more meaningful icon? Can we break with convention and just choose a different icon that's recognizable but more aesthetically pleasing or consistent with our style guides, even if it's still meaningless?
This isn't an argument against vestigial iconography. It's not even an argument against skeuomorphism. It's a recognition that skeuomorphism increasingly fails to serve its intended purpose of conveying a meaning. Once we recognize that the old icons are dead metaphors, that we often times keep them only because of inertia and not because they have any intrinsic value, we can build momentum on the necessary work of establishing the visual language of the digital age on its own terms.
What, you really think kids have no idea what floppy disks are? Of course they do! They're young, not stupid. It's not as hard as you're making it sound.
Language is full of dead metaphor. Words and symbols have meaning because they have been given meaning; most of the associations might as well be arbitrary. Doesn't matter; humans are very good at recognizing these associations and deriving the intent.
Floppy disks have entirely disappeared from our daily lives except as an icon (and then largely only on Windows). A computer-savvy 18 year old that grew up on Macs could have entirely grown up without ever using a floppy disk and rarely if ever seeing the icon. I know adolescents that have never seen a floppy disk. Being unfamiliar with an obsolete media format doesn't make them stupid.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not sure what you think I was trying to make sound difficult. I was arguing that it's entirely possible to replace the floppy disk with an arbitrary symbol, and it's just inertia (user training and a strange sacredness afforded this one random icon) that really keeps it around. I think assosciating a distinct symbol with an action is pretty damned easy, actually. (Designing a good symbol can be hard, though.)
One need not have ever personally used a floppy disk in order to recognize the symbol and pick up its meaning through cultural context; this is exactly how we learn to associate meanings with most of the symbols we use. We gain familiarity with all kinds of obsolete technologies throughout the course of an ordinary education, and easily recognize images of such devices whether or not we've ever seen one in real life - but beyond that, we learn to recognize all kinds of completely abstract symbols and use them as comfortably as words or numbers. There's nothing harmful about the fact that the "save" icon happens to look like an obsolete bit of storage media; the "save" symbol could have any shape, as long as it doesn't already represent something else.
Of course it's possible to pick a different symbol to represent the action of saving data to permanent storage: but why bother? We have a symbol, and it's as good as any other arbitrary symbol might be. Changing it would create confusion for no benefit, since it's ultimately the association of the symbol with the action that matters, and not the history of that symbol's origin.
I bet when you see a red octagon, you just think of it as a thing on the side of the road that means "stop", don't you? But despite your not knowing its origin, not knowing why it means stop, it still works well right?
To be honest, I don't know what point you're trying to make. It is as if you think I was claiming arbitrary symbols cannot work well as icons. But I actually said the opposite of that: the floppy disk is basically an arbitrary symbol at this point. It works because we train people what it means.
Yeah, but why are red/yellow/green "universal" colors for driving? I don't think it's because of some innate human love for those particular meanings of the colors. In fact, I'd bet that in a society without cars the red octagon would not be so "universally" understood to mean "stop."
Basic colour meanings of red and green transcend many genres of human existence, from business (using a red pen, or being "in the red") to entire gamuts of electronics and engineering, red warning stickers, etc.
I agree that the octagon is arbitrary. But that's beside the point, because it's self-evidently arbitrary. Nobody assumes there must be a deeper meaning behind a basic shape. The iconography of a floppy disk is not a basic shape.
> Can we devise a more meaningful icon? Can we break with convention and just choose a different icon that's recognizable but more aesthetically pleasing or consistent with our style guides, even if it's still meaningless?
I guess I don't see the point; you'll just confuse people who already know what the old icon means. Our letters aren't particularly brilliantly chosen (arguably other systems are more logical or easier to learn), and yet who wants to replace them?
The idea is that if you choose a good enough icon, you won't confuse people who know the old one. Users are at this point used to encountering unfamiliar icons and trying to quickly guess what they mean, so if a sufficiently communicative icon is chosen there should be no problem.
Importantly, the user has no reason to directly contrast the new icon to the old one. The user doesn't answer the question "Is this icon as effective as that old one?", they simply have to answer the question "Do I know how to perform the action I want to perform?", and as long as your save icon clearly communicates its meaning, there shouldn't be much/any confusion when the user tries to save. They'll look for something that seems to say "Click me to save", they'll see your icon, they'll say "Hey, that looks like it means 'Save'!", and they'll try it. (Aside: I don't say this randomly, I'm speaking from experience here; there have been plenty of applications in recent years that have tried out new "Save" icons, and I can't say I've ever had a problem figuring out how to save with any of them.)
As far as what "the point" is in changing out the icon, the point is that the entire reason for using action icons on buttons, etc. is to give the user an intuitive sense of what action will be performed when they click it, and as time goes on, the link between the floppy disk and digital storage will become weaker and weaker. And while it may be true that we could drag that symbol with us by convention, my question would be, why bother? If we can come up with something better, especially if we can find something that isn't tied to any specific technology (and I'd argue that we have), isn't this an improvement? I can't think of any advantage the old icon has over new ones other than the small advantage that it's familiar, but, as I said above, I don't think that's enough.
In other words, instead of asking "Why should we get rid of the floppy disk icon?", I honestly think the better question is, "Why not get rid of the floppy disc icon?"
That's all fine and good, but this response is entirely different from the blog's original argument that I was responding to. The original argument was "Icons should be based on real world objects because they give the user an immediate sense of what the icon is for." The argument here seems to be "People know what the current save icon means, so there's no reason to change it", and the thing is, this sort of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" viewpoint is pretty antithetical to our jobs as interaction designers. Even if most people know what the save button means by convention, that doesn't rule out that might find a better icon, one that is strictly iconic and not skeuomorphic in any way (in fact, I think some better alternatives have already been found are are gaining in popularity).
So in summary, while I agree that it's sometimes fine to use an old icon if enough people understand what it means by convention, this is not a good reason to avoid using the newer, less skeuomorphic icons that the linked blog post was trying to argue against.
Is it actually though? I used to read Jakob Nielsen's page a lot and he seemed to harp all the time on the point that you should stick to familiar designs rather than trying to demonstrate your creativity, even when objectively your design might be a little better.
iOS and OS X are still full of skeumorphisms. But why do they have to be so super ugly flat low-contrasty? Why can't we have futuristic inventive super abstract UI elements that are non-flat, with proper contrast and beautiful? Most people here conflate skeumorphism with non-flat stuff. So for you antonyms:
Have you ever even seen a pen like that? I'm willing to guess not. But everyone still recognized the contents of that icon, and correctly inferred that the app was for writing things.
So what you're saying is that we should have skeuomorphism, but mostly with things we've seen in TV shows and movies, especially period ones. This would tend to make everything look like stuff from pirate/fantasy/sci-fi/superhero movies. Looking back on indy developer graphics, that does seem to be a trend.
I don't want to make a strong case for or against any specific skeuomorphist style. I'm just arguing that there's a place for it in modern UIs if done well, and that I don't find it inherently bad to use "extinct objects" as metaphors.
Sums it up. Most interesting is that more teenagers tend to know what an icon is used for on the computer than what it originally represented. Which makes total sense because they grew up with these icons.
So it might make more sense to ask "to what degree are people used to this icon?" rather than "how many know where this icon came from?".
In this sense, changing established icons (like I would argue the photo app's one) doesn't seem such a good idea.
I'm the organizer of this conference. The stage is very flexible and has many opportunities for trap doors etc. It's honestly just a little creaky.
We've seen other benefits like folks have mentioned. It draws speakers out from behind the podium.
The theater we use is popular and we often didn't have the stage setup until 2AM the night before a 9AM start time. As organizers/hosts we couldn't be up that late.
Sometimes you come in and the stagehands at the venue read the notes about putting down the carpet and they decided to put two carpets instead of one. And the carpets are secured with gaffers tape. And you don't really see an issue with it so you leave it be.
My best guess is an acoustical reason. The floor might reflect the speaker's voice in ways that muddle it for the audience, so those carpets are placed in front of them to kill that reflection?
In the sphere of "talks," I know TED puts a big round carpet on stage that you're supposed to stay on while speaking. More generally for "carpets on stage," I've seen some smaller music venues and studios with carpets to make a nicer area for performers and to absorb unwanted sound (in the case of studios)
> Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
The old icon also had a photo on it though which made it clear it was the Photo's app, even if you don't know what the other thing is in the icon at all.
I know a few people who still print photos, but most of my friends never do. So a photo on a screen would maybe be a better metaphor if you need one.
It's a really difficult problem. So many of the things we do today are done on a rectangle with a screen. That doesn't make a good icon. Maybe icons are obsolete altogether?
And yet, people do grow up knowing that the green banana button means "phone" and the notched rectangle means "save", and often never even question "is there a real world analog for this icon?". It isn't that icons are obsolete: it is that we are graduating from a language of pictograms to a language of ideograms, yet for some reason we have large numbers of people telling us that that is somehow a horrible thing to do.
I don't think people are arguing against ideograms; in fact, I think the argument is very much in favor of ideograms, but simultaneously that icons like the floppy disk save icon are not very good ones. From what I've seen, there seems to be somewhat of a trend away from object-base metaphors and toward action-based metaphors, at least when it comes to action icons like the save icon. Instead of a picture of a storage device, modern or extinct, many applications now use icons intended to represent the act of storing something digitally, either using a an arrow directed down toward a rectangular shape meant to represent local media or using an arrow directed up into a cloud to represent cloud storage. (For an example of these, see Glyphicon's `glyphicon-save` and `glyphicon-cloud-upload` icons[1].)
One explicit advantage that these sorts of icons have is that they allow for a nice symmetry between Save and Open icons and upload/download icons (Glyphicon is again a good example; see glyphicon-open and glyphicon-cloud-download). This ties into another, perhaps more arguable advantage, a blurring between local and remote save actions. As applications become increasingly web-based, device-independent, and portable, it makes more sense to me to intentionally separate the "save" action from it's destination; I don't care so much where or how my data is saved, I only care that it's save and that I can get it back later.
I'd love to hear responses to my thoughts here; they sort of developed as I wrote the comment, so they're rather fresh at the moment.
Personally I liked the old way when there was a crappy low resolution icon, with text underneath telling you what it was. In most interfaces since the text disappeared it takes me a while to work out what at least some of the icons are.
That may be intentional. Road signs typically see lots of usability research (do drivers recognize this when driving past it at 50 mph in fog?) before they are deployed, and a modern camera is just a box.
I once read that one country decided to keep the steam train on their road signs based on such results because it makes it easier to distinguish it from other signs.
> Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Actually a problem with this icon is that it is misleading. The iPhoto app is not a camera app. It is a photo library with some minor editing capabilities. You can't use it for creating photos which is what the icon suggests.
A better icon would be a photo album or a stack of photos but that's hard to fit in an icon.
>Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
It makes sense for older people who remember them, who also are the folks who are more likely to have trouble understanding and interacting with computers. If your target audience was just young kids with neuroelasticity and hipsters who live this stuff, you could deploy a Brainfuck UI/UX and not only would they get it, they'd love it.
There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Case in point – telling a young kid how to answer a call on the iPhone: press the green banana button.