This. And I'd like to add: sometimes the best icons are these little characters called the alphabet. Combined they're very powerful and are called 'words'.
I was just having a discussion with our customer support manager for an coming update to our software. He made this point, ”I really like it when buttons have names. Then I can tell the customers ’click the EXPORT button’ instead of ’click the little button that kinda looks like a square with an arrow pointing out of it’”.
It really is a very good point.
Earlier today I attempted to use an android app I wasn't familiar with. I uninstalled it after the 57th time I had to ask myself, "what in the everliving donkey fuck is that icon supposed to be"?
That's what I get for installing an app that describes itself as "beautiful".
On Android you can long-press a confusing icon-only button to get a Toast with a textual description.
This was how I did my car PC decades ago.
Just big buttons with words on them. Words become symbols and do at a glance you could still easily tell what everything is even if you wouldn't actually read it when using it.
And then they became featureless monochrome blobs because that's the new trend, and now words are again needed to tell what each is supposed to mean.
Characters are also easier to learn than emojis and iconographs because there are less of them.
There are thousands of Chinese characters and thousands of Kanji. Maybe we are destined to replace all existing written language with 10’s of thousands of emoji?
I’ll be illiterate in that world, but my kids seem to grok it.
Chinese characters can be used as a writing system because they're actually highly abstract. They don't look like what their ancestors were supposed to represent. That's a feature, not a bug.
The issue with emoji is that they're very literal.
The irony is that I think 囧 is the only emoji that is allowed on HN. Seriously, though, there are plenty of very old out of use characters that can be used as emoji, and modern use of Chinese characters in new words is increasingly phonetic.
AFAIK, Chinese characters are words, not a more basic unit. The thing with emoji is that there’s no easy way to use them without typing their associated terms.
So you believe it's easier to learn which combination of letters in the context of a given interface means "home" or "chat" than an icon? You don't understand how the human brain works, it's much quicker to discern an icon as you glance at a screen then find a word and get your brain to interpret their meaning. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, an enormous amount of dictionary words, but it very unusual to have a single screen containing more than 10 different icons.
To understand icons, they must resemble something you have seen before. If you were born in 2005, you won't know what the button with the floppy disk on it does because you have never seen or used a floppy.
Or a cloud to mean "upload", or a thin moon crescent to mean "sleep".
These are things that don't derive from the real world (any more) and must be explicitly communicated.