2013-11-30

Button Labels

On the New UI I use graphical labels for some of the buttons - a magnifying glass for search, a question mark for help, a gear for settings, and a house for "home". Those are all pretty universal iconography for the Web at this point, and there are tooltips for accessibility.

I'm using textual labels for three buttons:

  • Legend - this is pretty unique to this site, and I can't think of a universally understandable icon. I'm pondering whether Legend deserves to be a top level item or should be under "?". I also hide Legend on small screens.
  • Important - this is a "default" search for important worlds.  Again, no universal icon for this concept. I believe this feature will evolve into more of a "browsable, sharable sets of points of interest". Maybe a point-of-interest icon, then?
  • Share - this one is starting to shake out as a standard icon - the three circles in a < formation - but it's not quite universal yet.
Thoughts?

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7 comments:

Joshua Bell said...

Maybe a star for what's now "important" ?

77topaz said...

For "share", maybe an amalgamation of the logos of the relevant sites (Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr in this case)? I've seen such graphics used in other locations (but then usually with sharing on Facebook and Twitter).

Joshua Bell said...

I went ahead and replaced the "Important" label with a star and I'm liking it better already.

Anonymous said...

The link for the sector name, that in the old version went to the printable booklet page, now simply goes back to a duplicate of the current page.

Joshua Bell said...

@Anonymous -

Thanks - I must have pushed only a subset of the files after I tweaked some scripts. Should work now if you reload the page.

Joshua Bell said...

... and now the booket/poster/data links are gone... but that's intentional!

They've moved up to a (hopefully) more discoverable "Download" button up at the top. If you click on it with nothing "selected" it gives a hint of what's possible.

Consul-At-Arms said...

Other than spelling out "Legend" (as you've done), my only suggestion in terms of a symbol would be to use a graphic of a KEY instead.

In my lengthy experience of maps, civilian and military, "Legend" tends to either be unlabeled as such or marked, unironically, "Legend."