Overheard in a break room at work:  “Is it supposed to rain tonight?”  “I saw a picture of raindrops on the news this morning.”  “I saw a lightning bolt for today and raindrops for the rest of this week.”

On a conference call of managers discussing a new time management program for He’s company one manager complained, “the icon for bereavement and for vacation days is almost the same.  Can’t they change one?”

Transcript of a real conversation:  “What’s your sister’s number?”  “Let me check my phone.”

It started innocently enough.  A picture of a red triangle inside another red triangle appeared on the dashboards of cars all across America, all across the world!  No explanation. No late breaking news on any of the major stations.  Oh sure, if you were to read the owner’s manual it would mention that this was the switch to activate the hazard/warning lights.   Otherwise, it was up to the owner to find this out but randomly pushing the button.

Before long another button showed up on the dash with what might be a picture of a snow flake.  (You’d have thought American car makers were distributing their products around the world.)  It might also be a picture of the sun which would indicate to the driver that if the sun was up and got the inside of the car hot, pushing this button will relieve the discomfort by chilling the air before blowing it into the passenger cabin.  Clearly even the authors of the owner’s manual were unsure of which (snowflake or sunshine) this button represented because they just showed a replica of it and defined it as “air conditioning.”

Whether snow or sun this opened the gates for icons to take over other aspects of American life.  Soon weather forecasts would be taken over by pictograms; applications would have descriptors rather than descriptions; photos would appear on phones instead of phone numbers.

Words are becoming a precious commodity.  So precious that some of those applications represented by pictures of things that have nothing to do with the applications’ intents actually limit the number of characters, and thus the number of words, a user might use.  This could be a good thing in that if one can’t come up with more than 25 or 30 words to make out of 140 or so characters then one must come up with alternatives to represent whole words with one, two, or three letters.  And now icons have exploded the use of abbreviations.  (But that’s another post for another day.)

But where were we?  Do you know if it’s supposed to rain today?  Let’s check the pictures on TV and see what they say.  Hmm, we wonder what’s going to happen to weather forecasts on the radio.

🙂

Now, that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you?