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Comment by radley | Hacker News Reader

UI designers are constantly forced to come up with new icons for crazy new features.

It's a common practice to look for it on Google images, i.e. "Save Icon", and see if there's a common metaphor. If not, you look for similar use cases - something so that it's much quicker for users to grok what it does.

That's the fundamental purpose after all.

This was the problem with Google/Android's new icons as well as GitHub. Google got caught up with minimization and left out the telling differentiators. Githup went nuts on illustration and lost the original meanings.

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Yep, and you have supposed "leaders" like Apple that just give up and stop trying. Apple widely just throws up a button with a "gear" on it when they're too lazy to organize functions properly. And there's no telling what the gear button will do.

Even worse is the Easter-egg UIs that are becoming a widespread problem: There's no icon (or even control) at all until you accidentally roll the cursor over the area. WTF? Are users supposed to sweep across every pixel on the screen now, looking for hidden goodies?

Not sure what the gear is you mention, but I can't think of another company that has Apple's drive for intuitive UI, which is the fundamental purpose of icons.

In contrast, HN is a text-dominant application designed for text-dominant users...

Innovative doesn't mean intuitive - why is pinch zoom? Wouldn't it be more intuitive for pinch to close an app - after all you pinch things closed ?

Pinch isn't zoom. Unpinch in zoom. It would be intuitive for pinch to close an app, but not more intuitive, because in some apps your intent to zoom out could be confused with wanting to close the app (mobile Safari) and for other apps accidental finger brushes might cause an accidental closing of an app. The way touch gestures work now actually make a lot of sense. It seems like you're reaching.

Four finger pinch does close apps, though. And pinch as zoom makes sense if you ever played with newsprint transfered to silly putty!

What flat surface do you close by pinching it? Moreover, it seems you're trying to equate "intuitive gesture" with gestures people use with (non-computer) everyday objects, but I don't see why that is a requirement for intuitiveness.

Pinching to zoom in and out makes a lot of sense in my mind. Place your thumb and index finger at two points on a map/image/website. Those two points are two corners of a visual area. To make that visual area larger, expand the points outward. To make the area smaller, pinch inward. This conceptual mapping is very straightforward.

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