Information tips can clarify complex UIs, but they should not hide essential information, trigger redundant information, or disrupt the current workflow.
Contextual menus reduce clutter and interaction cost but have low information scent. Prioritize clarity, consistency, and proximity to balance the tradeoffs.
Overflow menu icons are widely recognized, but hiding key actions inside them can hurt usability. Use them for secondary actions, and always prioritize clarity and proximity.
Users still recognize the floppy disk icon as ‘save,’ but evolving workflows mean it may no longer be the clearest or most appropriate choice in many cases.
Test icons out-of-context to assess recognizability early on, and in-context to evaluate clarity and usability later—both are key to effective icon design.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improving the design of her organization's website.
Distinguishing between these two actions is critical to avoiding losing users’ work. Save changes before closing a view, use text labels rather than an X icon, and provide a confirmation dialog before destructive actions.
Universal icons are rare. To help overcome the ambiguity that almost all icons face, a text label must be present alongside an icon to clarify its meaning.
Related links are often chunked as a set, each with an icon. One bad icon hurts user interaction. A set of bad icons is worse because it amplifies confusion, adds clutter, and wastes screen real estate.
Users are 37% faster at finding items within a list when visual indicators vary both in color and icon compared to text alone. If choosing between using color or an icon, icons with strong information scent perform better than color alone.
