Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Icons
Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 11 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
- 1
- 1
Every issue, all time, most people first
Icons are hard to interpret without a labelUnreviewed
20122026- Icons are harder to interpret than text labels, with no way to turn them off2025-02-23
- Icons have different meanings across populations and are confusing until explained2023-07-18
- Icons are confusing until learned, and operations are hard to symbolize2023-01-16
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Younger users can't recognise the floppy disk save icon2025-05-25
- Icons are harder to interpret than text labels, with no way to turn them off2025-02-23
- Icons have different meanings across populations and are confusing until explained2023-07-18
- Icons are confusing until learned, and operations are hard to symbolize2023-01-16
- Icons all one color, so the commenter can't quickly tell them apart2020-10-04
- Icons without text labels are ambiguous, e.g. two similar magnifying glass icons mean search or zoom2020-08-03
- Icons force a switch to graphics mode to work out their meaning2015-12-19
- Icons without labels are hard for users to understand2015-11-18
- Icons are hard to interpret, since users can't tell what an icon means without a label2013-08-29
- Icons are left without labels, so users can't tell what they mean2012-11-19
- Users struggle to recognise and remember many icons, needing tooltips to find them2012-05-09