Deciphering the icons in my room
Your bedroom is supposed to be your sanctuary…but what happens when you can’t figure out how to turn off the light?
If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t read the manual of that new electronic thing you just bot. You just fiddle with it and see what happens. You learn from experience.
I’ve had the desk lap pictured above for a few months now, but I don’t think I’ve confidently used the icons (other than power) once. Each icon could technically be used for something else or don’t have enough context to properly let the user know exactly what they’re doing. There’s also a definite hierarchy to how often one might use each of those icons.
And then there’s this little guy, the remote for overly fancy essential oils diffuser. Similarly to the desk lamp icons, I find myself using only a few of these and the rest I get to guess what they do every I pick up the remote.
But what I have noticed about these two different products’ controls (they’re not made by the same company, I’d like to add) is that there are categories that each of the buttons could go in, such as:
- Power
- Increase or decrease [something]
- Change mode
Let’s take a look at the lamp’s assumed actions and actual actions:
3/5 of the icons are essentially unknown to the user. And even in the case of the brightness icon, the only way to know where you are in the spectrum of the lamp’s brightness is to just tap the icon until you get right back where you came from.
While all of these icons come from something that we might have figured out eventually (i.e. the color light comes from the venn diagram showing the additive colors of light; subtractive colors of pigments), these icons could definitely have been boosted with a little help from words.
In the case of the lamp, I personally only use the lamp on the brightest setting and in natural light form. My most tapped icon is the power button, unless I accidentally messed up my standard setting. Would adding words to these icons make me use the other features more? Maybe. Did the product need those extra features to make me buy it? Probably not. Sometimes products, and the icons that go with them, are better limited than fully flushed out.
