I spent most daylight hours yesterday driving in torrential rains in beautiful bad visibility, and I was astonished how many cars didn’t have their lights on.
It looked item akin this. The cars alongside rear lights on were slightly visible, but the cars without them didn’t remain a chance:
I peruse up concerning it, and it turns out that the matter wasn’t as much forgetfulness or carelessness. Rather, it all power have to do alongside iconography.
Cars have two chief settings for lights:
- “regular driving,” meant to be used at night and during constricted visibility – akin in dense rains,
- “parking,” which activates lone forefront lights, at fractional brightness, and (for several reason) leaves the rear lights off.
The UI for lights seems to typically appearance akin this:
Without knowing, can you fig out which environment is which?
The remaining icon alongside two lights facing distant from all another method the parking lights. The far-right icon alongside one ray pointing slightly downward (“low beams”) is regular driving lights. The second is the correct item to do in the rain, but the project feels benevolent of arbitrary to me, and I could totally see the icons going the another way.
Also, the complete is a slightly gentle situation. In my rental car, the lights were on a stalk, and the setup looked additional akin this:
Here:
- the lightbulb on the remaining is a meta indicator for “this is the chief ray setting” (you can see it complete too, on the dial),
- the center part alongside the wavy row is fog lights,
- the arrow-heavy item on the correct informs of two things: drag on the stalk for elevated beams (another mode), or rotate the stalk remaining or correct for rotate signals.
That’s a lot of material going on, and many akin icons that do not appear immediately understandable. The entire interface seems optimized for motor memory, but harder to method at first.
In the two modes, the feedback from inner the car is exactly the identical – you see the inner dashboards illuminate, and the forefront lights go up. At night, you power place the difference in the forefront ray intensity. But in the daytime rain, it’s small apt – particularly if it’s a rare serious rain you don’t encounter often. Most considerably stated the commencement of the story, you merely can’t see what your rear lights are up to.
From study up on it, I accept what happened was the disturbance between the two modes – group were driving alongside the finest of intentions, really turning on the lights… apart from the incorrect benevolent of lights.
(Many cars have an AUTO choice now, but would you rely it to choose the correct thing? I didn’t, being unsure if it correctly accounted for daylight rain driving.)
Lost perchance amidst the latest conversations concerning icons in menus and app icons was another subtle change: Apple started embracing additional iconography on buttons, too.
You can see it on keyboards, anywhere the U.S. models followed in the footsteps of global ones, now showing symbols alternatively of legends for Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, Fn, Enter, Return, and Delete. Here’s the former generation and the 2026 one:
The change additionally happened on screens. Below are examples from the final three versions of iOS (18, 26, and 27), flank by side.
When starting a new note, it’s not fair the keyboard’s ↵ that replaced Return. The rear icon additionally misplaced its legend, and Done became a checkmark:
Here power be the finest case scenario, alongside Cancel and Done exchanged alongside icons:
In this AirDrop screen, Done became a near box:
Elsewhere, Cancel morphed into ×, in an unlucky stance next to a distinct ×. Plus, Search on the keyboard became a loupe:
When screenshotting, Done was splintered into a checkmark and an ×:
And here, Done transformed into a checkmark, during Edit became a new benevolent of a coat icon:
Seeing all this, I was reminded of this old article from Dmitry Fadeyev, titled “False simplicity”:
Sometimes, what appears on the exterior to be uncomplicated is really far from it. For example, there’s a trend in Twitter clients to use icons alternatively of content labels for buttons. Just icons, no content at all. These icons don’t obtain much space, appearance elegant and keep that uncomplicated awareness of Twitter, except…they’re really fair confusing.
Fadeyev additionally quoted Jef Raskin’s obtain on icons:
In all study that considered the question, icons were demonstrated to be additional difficult to comprehend than were labels, particularly at archetypal viewing, which contradicts among the most frequently cited reasons for using icons, namely, comprehensibility for beginners. […] Although it is true that small icons can obtain small display area than labels, you have to ask: At what cost? The smaller a button, the longer it takes to run it, and the additional difficult it is to find; also, it is difficult to create a small icon distinctive.
I akin that take.
Here’s my individual go-to cheat panel whenever it comes to iconography:
- icons are compact, allowing you to compression in “more UI,”
- people likely comprehend lone a few icons (close box, checkmark, plus, several chevrons), and can study others – but the learning procedure volition be harder than you think,
- many icons are never understood, but group can motionless to several degree use them without always understanding them,
- icons can interrupt the monotony of an all-text interface,
- well-made icons create the interface appearance additional appealing in a way category can’t.
I don’t accept Apple is doing it all fair for aesthetical reasons. My conjecture is that it’s additional concerning the archetypal projectile item above: liquid pane added so much chrome and padding that Apple merely ran out of area for content labels encased in glass.
At the archetypal glance, Apple is avoiding the car ray issue by using famous icons. However, there’s a new challenge: most of these icons are too popular, and overloaded alongside meaning:
- checkmark: “commit” or “to do item/checkbox”?
- ×: “close” or “clear”?
- loupe: “search” or “zoom”?
The lone outlier is the edit icon, comparatively new and apt unknown. With the additional difficulty that on-hover tooltips don’t be on contact devices, the way onward would be to use the coat icon consistently to instruct it to people, but it seems Apple isn’t yet doing a awesome job at that. The below screenshots are all iOS 27, anywhere you can see the leftover Cancel and Done labels in place, and a missed chance to put the new edit icon next to Customize to assistance group nexus the concepts:
I desire I could peek inner Apple to see how these efforts are faring, and what’s in store.
To go rear to keyboards, I am inquisitive why Apple didn’t consistently use content and icons for all the affected keys, akin they did for the base row a during back. Here there was adequate room:
And how could we resolve the car problem, if iconography is certainly the culprit? I could ideate a akin idea current as well:
But the comic item is that most contemporary cars have a digital dashboard, so for the archetypal time, tooltips are an option. You could ideate turning the stalk and seeing this benevolent of a communication appear for a few seconds, the clarification and the icon flank by flank to assistance the person nexus one to the other:
Perhaps seeing the term “parking” would assistance several group acknowledge their mistake.
Of course, introducing a tooltip method “now you have two problems,” but let’s preserve that for a distinct post.
