Emerging standards for mobile web UI
Responsive sites or adaptive sites or whatever you like to call them are here to stay. As the creative team and the UX team work together to shrink desktop sites down to fully featured tablet and mobile sites, we’re starting to get back into iconography.
Iconography is always hit and miss.
Choosing a triangle to represent ‘register online now’ isn’t intuitive. In fact, if you have to put the word ‘register online now’ next to the triangle icon, then why have the icon at all? Iconography only works if you can drop the words. Like an ‘x’ for close or an ‘i’ for information.
But how do these icons become recognisable in the first place?
Well someone has to bite the bullet and say:
“An ‘x’ symbol is going to be close. Get used to it.”
Now when it comes to mobile design, there’s a couple of standards that are now starting to bubble up out of the mass of mobile and tablet sites launching each day.
The first one that comes to mind is:
The symbol for menu. Amazing that Google and Facebook could strike a deal on this one. Now we all know what ≡ means, although it was probably a pretty intuitive symbol to begin with.
If you catch anyone trying to design a website with a menu button that’s any other symbol (e.g. ‘+’), let them know they’re diluting the emerging standard.
