Readit NewsAnd I'm fine with a bit of cognitive exploration to figure out a green check and red X scheme rather than see a whole table column filled up with words like "active" and "inactive". The former allows more columns on screen at once. Horizontal scrolling is a worse impediment to assimilating information from a table.
Our users are context switching across dozens if not hundreds of digital experiences a day. Forcing memory recall is a tax. The question is always "whats the ROI?"
IMO color and words go just as far as an icon without relying on net new visual language.
As per your comment on horizontal scrolling, I couldn't agree more. Horizontal scrolling is booty. However, depending on the job to be done you can avoid overly wide tables with customizable columns, expandable rows, hover states, and strategic truncation.
I certainly would prefer those strategies over relying on a unique icon language that isn't part of the dozen or so immediately recognizable icon schemas already familiar to users.
All the example table images seem fine, and have no captions saying whether they're supposed to be examples of good usage or bad usage.
So either I have no idea what "bad" examples of icon usage are because the author doesn't show any, or the author thinks some or all of them are bad when, to me, the icon+text+color examples seem great (and one figure caption indicates icons+labels are best)?
Yet the author continues to argue against icons and to use text instead? But never says whether icons+labels are actually better than just text, so we should use them in combination?
I'm baffled. For an article arguing for greater clarity, the article itself couldn't be less clear.
In a data grid or table the relative cognitive load of the page is already very high. Adding iconography to the table body content is often unnecessary and increases visual noise, processing requirements, and generally reduces readability/scanability.
I've always felt that icons in this context are a risk or liability instead of a strength. I decided to info dump my findings to my team then published it as an article.
I probably could use a good editor to help me next time!
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Right now, I am tasked with building a PoC for a new product my team wants to build by the end of the quarter. We have one big problem - we have no designer on staff. But we do have a design system with a library with re-usable react components and tailwind css, and those are things I am pretty good with. So I have full autonomy when it comes to turning product requirements into a live demo. I was able to accomplish quite a lot in a short period of time with no designer and just my own taste in design + ux. And product stakeholders were pretty satisfied, which means the outcome was productive.
So from my perspective, Figma is not only an awkward middle ground, but not even necessary for me.