Don’t Use Obsolete Icons

For about 20 years, the “floppy diskette” icon has meant “save” and this connection persists in UIs across desktop and web apps. It was a great visual metaphor for a long time, but things have changed and many users under the age of 20 will have never laid eyes on a floppy disk—if they know it at all, it’ll be from seeing the icon, not the real object.

Other examples include old telephones with handsets, curly cords, and rotary dials; radio microphones from the 1950s; and reel-to-reel tape recorder icons to mean “voicemail.”

Figure 35.1: Ten years from now, nobody will know what any of these are

Try to think about how the visual metaphors you use will work for different age groups, cultures, and languages. Searching for the right visual metaphor for an icon is often challenging work but rewarding, and your users will benefit from increased familiarity with your product.

Increasingly...