Imagine I’m dying to know whether anyone liked my Facebook event. I open up my recent activity and come across this:
Too much text
After reading for half a minute I see that a Lenny Antonelli likes my event. But it takes ages. I could try scanning the text for the words “event” or “like”, but this isn’t much faster as all the words except peoples names & the dates look identical (i.e. the fonts are the same height , have same black colour and are instances of the same kind of ‘thing’ , organized collections of letters.
Webmasters can improve user experience by associating well designed visual icons with differing activities. In the following example I can see that my event was liked by Lenny in a split second by scanning the page for the thumb’s up “like: icon. See what I mean:
Here’s a second example from Google Documents. I want to distinguish my folders from my actual documents. As you can see the task is next to impossible in the first example then mind numbingly simple in the second example, due to icon usage.
Without icons its damn hard to distinguish files from folders
With icons the distinction is obvious
Icons categorize and organize data better than text. The visual contrast created by visual art (rather than words), flexible sizing (rather than fixed font size) and multiple colour usage (instead of monotone) makes icons much easier for your brain to process. Information is communicated at ten times the speed.
If information is power then communication is your crowning ceremony. Speed up your ascent by using icons to communication in your websites, notes or work practices.
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