Title: Icon Usability
Context: Nobody knows what your icon means. It’s just science.
Synopsis: After weeks of struggle, you finally solved it. You came up with an icon to represent some abstract concept in your navigation schema, that you are positive all of your users will instantly recognize. Except they don’t. Your use of the heart/star/check/macaroon to represent favorite/save/like/antidisestablishmentarianism just didn’t resonate with people. They were left as quivering pools of confusion after their fruitless attempts to unravel the idiosyncratic riddle that is your sphinx-like icon. Too bad, it was a pretty sweet graphical representation of a macaroon after all.
Best Bit: “Use the 5-second rule: if it takes you more than 5 seconds to think of an appropriate icon for something, it is unlikely that an icon can effectively communicate that meaning.”
via nngroup.com
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