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Very much disagree that those things are clear.

- Obviously the clock is time related, but there is no clue how. After reading this, I still don't know what it does. Is it a "remind me later" icon?

- The right pointing rectangle is too abstract. I agree with the article that it looks like a road sign, or like gmail's own "importance" markers. IMO, if they rotated it 45 degrees and put a hole in the point, it would be much more clear.

To me this obviously looks like sticky notes you can add in books or on files to categorize content, a.k.a. quite literally tags.

They're supposed to be the old-school paper tags with a hole in the narrow end [0].

These tags, like floppy's and manila folders, will live on in our iconography even as someone born this decade is unlikely ever encounter the real thing. I was recently amused to explain to my kid what the dialer icon on the iPhone is: "well, a long, long time ago (it's getting close to 20 years now since the Nokia 3310 sold over a 100 million units and we got rid of our landline) we used to have stationary phones in our homes and you would talk into a wired handset that looked like this icon".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Martha-Stewart-Crafts-Kraft-Tags/dp/B...

Moreover, things like tags and manila envelopes are very Western or even American. A lot of the world doesn't have these tags or manila envelopes.

> someone born this decade is unlikely ever encounter the real thing

UX design used to reach further back than current decade. Even in the ancient days of early Windows, not many people had had first-hand experience using an hourglass anymore ;)

> it seems quite natural that a time-related action would be setting a reminder.

I think this highlights that everyone potentially has a different understanding. That wasn't obvious to me, or the article's author. Personally I would expect a reminder button to have a bell icon.

> Personally I would expect a reminder button to have a bell icon.

Likely because you've associated a bell with "alarm", and you're associated "alarm" with "reminder", but that's likely a learned association because of these systems because alarm really means danger. An "alarm clock" is probably the origination of that association, but I think the terminology could have just as easily gone with "notification clock" or "wake-up clock" originally, and we woulnd't be using "alarm" as we do much of the time now.

I think what this actually points to is that while some icons have become normalized over time, (settings is usually indicated by bars, or the "hamburger" icon, power has a well accepted icon now), there exist people that still don't know them well because they either haven't used modern devices enough, or used older devices without a standard enough that it takes longer to recognize the convergence.

I imagine any proposed icon standard probably has about a decade before it's widely understood by most people, because of the lag in usage in popular applications, which lags exposure to people, and the large number of people that use technology where it would be present sparingly enough that it takes a long time to become obvious and accepted. In the end though, I think that's what's needed, as skeuomorphic and conceptual based icons have problems as noted here.

> the terminology could have just as easily gone with "notification clock" or "wake-up clock" originally

In that case we would still use bell icons. Because the bell would be still associated with the "notification clock" or the "wake-up clock".

But it still falls into skeuomorphism. How many people are familiar with the traditional alarm clock with a bell? My daughter is, but only because I took her phone away as a punishment, and the cheap alarm clock she picked out to wake up in the morning happened to be the traditional design.

Sure, but it doesn’t have anything to do with bell-equipped clocks being called “alarm clocks”, “notification clocks” or “wake-up clocks”.

Edit: The association is ringing bell <=> notification/wakeup, not about alarms/danger. I think a siren light icon would be used for that. Which is also an interesting case study on shift of meaning as sirens were originally about sound (and songs) and not a warning signal but a danger themselves.

We're getting into territory that is far enough in the past that I'm unsure of the origination or prior common uses. That is sort of the point though, many of these icons are linked to things conceptually and visually which themselves came about from visual or conceptual links, but are at this point mostly obsoleted. That, along with the spread of those concepts into neighboring concepts, leads to a lot of baggage and ambiguity when using images that link to these concepts visually.

I think, given the choice of using an icon of an alarm clock or bell or even just a round faced clock[1], or creating some new image that we can try to standardize on, we'll be better off eventually if we choose the latter.

1: This one might be particularly troublesome in the future. Rounds faced clocks aren't exactly rare, but they are getting less common every year. In the future using it might be akin to using a representation of an abacus to represent a calculator. If people think that's ridiculous, consider that my parents used an abacus in high school, so it's not that far removed...

What doe a "bell" look like? I can't remember the last time I saw a bell.

Where do you live that you don't have bells?

I live in USA, where we don't have 100-year-old churches, and not in Philadelphia.

I have lots of bells -- on my door and in my phone, for example. I have no idea what they look like, though.

> not in Philadelphia

isn't the liberty bell in philly?

Yes, where I don't live.

>The clock is associated with time. In the context of received mail, it seems quite natural that a time-related action would be setting a reminder.

To me a clock in this context means I can schedule an e-mail message to be sent later. If I want a reminder, I'll use a reminders or to do app, not an e-mail client.

Read: All the icons that I'm familiar with make sense to me.

I don't mean this in jest. I feel the same way about some of the icons, and I can figure out what the rest are via tooltips, but they are sure as hell confusing if it's your first time using GMail.

I don’t use GMail. Clock is time-related, so I guessed this icon is for “save for later”. Right-pointing rectangle? I would guess it is for moving mails between folders.

> To me this obviously looks like sticky notes you can add in books or on files to categorize content, a.k.a. quite literally tags.

Others have already pointed out that this is not the origin of the tag association. I'd also add that pointy-ended "recto-triangles" aren't really the archetype of a sticky note (a yellow Post-it is), and for a lot of people, there's a good chance they never ever seen a fancy one like that, unless they spend way too much time exploring office supplies stores.