Icons - businesses' favourite waste of time (ref 63)
Some icons help. Like the ones at the top of the screen in MS Word. The Format Painter tool helps me quickly format stuff, and its ‘paintbrush’ icon helps me quickly locate the tool. A neat double act. I use that icon constantly.
Some icons don’t help. Like ones in most reports. Alongside the 'IT' section, there’s a computer icon. The HR section has a ‘person’ icon. And so on.
Icons adorn not just paragraphs, but bits of info too. A 'phone' icon alongside a phone number. A 'computer' icon alongside a web address. Who’d have guessed it, eh! Just pointless - after all, would the London underground map be better if we add a cute ‘train’ icon to each tube line?
Icons - businesses' favourite waste of time: got a report to write? Not sure what to say? No worries – don't fret over the words... heck, they don’t matter. Instead, insert icons. Fun. It beats doing real work.
Also, imagine we’re not the author but the manager that reviews the report before it’s circulated – and the report doesn’t seem quite right, and we want to help, but are unsure how. No worries… icons dig us out of a hole. We comment on them (from a position of ignorance too) – which to use where. How many. What colour. What size. “There you go,” we say to ourselves, “we’ve helped”.
Nightmare on Icon Street: I hear horror stories from clients. Meetings convened purely to discuss a particular report’s icons. Consultancies paid lots to create icons for a client's reports. Dozens of icons created and rolled out Group-wide... even one for humous (I shudder to imagine it). Crazy.
Also, consider this: good icons won't save a bad report. And bad icons will harm a good report - readers will criticise and mock them (I've seen it happen). OK, arguably icons attract us to a document - but then distract us from the content. Do you want readers to discuss your report? Or your icons? (Would this email be better with icons? Maybe I should show an icon to show how I feel about icons - but I shudder (again) to imagine it.)
But wait... maybe icons - like the Format Painter ‘paintbrush’ - help readers find stuff in reports. No, for two reasons: (1) lack of repetition: a report has, say, 15 different icons, each shown just once or twice in the report - hence we never get sufficient unprompted recall of each icon for them to help us. And: (2) lack of standardisation: icons mean different things in different reports. (If only the world could agree on icons... maybe we need a Global Icon Team (GIT).)
And, icon-lovers, don’t fool yourself that icons are intuitive. That we know what they mean without being told.
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