Cool, so we don't need icons at all!

Indeed, icons are unnecessary. They're there to fill space with colors, which people like. Full = good. Color = happy. good + happy = sales.

Is happiness unnecessary? Doesn't it matter what people like? I don't mean the masses, I mean people who evolved to navigate meatspace. Shouldn't designs make people happy?

I think the idea that they make no difference to usability sounds quite wrong.

It's quicker to glance at icons and spot the app right away than not read each and every item in a list.

Anyway, I think the idea is to get some visual cue that you're about to tap the right icon. You know where you put your apps on your home screen, so the colors or wahtever lead you there faster. And the icon provides a large touch target.

Going back to the original article, it doesn't really matter what the icon looks like, as long as it's unique. You're not looking at each icon and asking yourself "is this a camera?" to get to the Photos app. You know it's a circular array of colors, and your finger goes there.

I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this earlier. Everyone's arguing about what image the icon contains and thinking of imaginary folks who are using computers for the first time after coming off a ship from a lonely desert island.

Back in 'teh day' when my icons were all cutesy skeuomorphs, my computer came with maybe a dozen apps and most of them were on my desktop. Now, I have over a hundred sitting in my global Apps folder alone - never mind user Apps, sub folders, etc.

This gets compounded even more on phones - on my iPhone, I've accidentally placed 1Password next to the Settings app - both have a grey background with a circular center. Settings' center is grey gears, 1Passwords is a blue ring with a keyhole. On examination, they're not similar at all, but I can't even begin to tell you how many times I clicked on when, meaning to click the other - even _knowing_ the differences and kicking myself each time.

I think a lot of what the designers are trying to do is create an icon that stands out visually, and is easily found from amongst a large set of other icons, rather than trying to impress upon us what its functionality is from a metaphor.

> You know where you put your apps on your home screen

Really? Because when I used an iPhone, I most definitely didn't know where most of my apps' icons were. I knew most of them on the first screen and the rest of the screens were a mix of random stuff.

YMMV.

I'm far faster at picking text labels from a list than picking the icons. I see the text label as an icon.

The text "icon" is simple and unchanging. I can pick it out much faster than funny pictograms that change with each OS version.

> The text "icon" is simple and unchanging. I can pick it out much faster than funny pictograms that change with each OS version.

Tell that to my muscle memory that types ⌘A > iP for iPhoto and ⌘A > iCal for iCalendar.

Perhaps for you. But for me, icons are cryptic. I can glance at a list of words and find exactly what I'm looking for. My brain is wired to read and pick out words much faster than little drawings.

No it doesn't.

Mine says "Photos" above it.

But what has actually happened is a mess of inconsistent designs. Older apps still use skeuomorphism. Newer apps copy the flat look.

Skeuomorphism implemented a design principle - discoverability. You could argue with the choices made for specific icons, but there was a consistent goal - to make the OS as usable as possible.

The flat look is an anti-pattern - fashion over discoverability. The point seems to be to allow Sir Jony to impress everyone with his aesthetic skillz. User experience has become secondary to internal politics.

That's a huge problem for a company like Apple, because it'a fundamental shift in focus.

And there have been obvious effects. Watch isn't doing brilliantly, precisely because the user experience is nothing special. iOS is creaking under the weight of new features apparently added with no overall strategy, many of which remain invisible to users because the literally never find them.

MacOS is going the same way. Some of the new features are certainly welcome. But the Apple UX generally is suffering badly - from bugs, from questionable design choices, from popular products like Logic and FCP that have been cut down, then more or less abandoned.

There's no one in charge to obsessively fine tune the conflicting needs of product momentum, reliability, UX, and aesthetics.

Jobs was very good at that. Cook doesn't even seem to realise there's an issue.