Even if they couldn’t identify a universally understood icon, an existing user can recognize a familiar symbol faster than text, and symbols at least provide some clue that isn’t dependent on English comprehension.
Of course any such decision will be a balancing act, but I can certainly imagine that an unexpected or confusing symbol would be genuinely confusing or frightening to a new user (think how early this was in mass-market computing!), and that an experienced user (1) can re-learn, (2) anyway probably doesn't have to re-learn muscle memory still gets them to the right place, and (3) is more likely to be invested in the system than a new user, so that it might be considered less essential to invest in keeping them than in bringing on new users.
English compression was not an issue here. The buttons would have been translated.
Anyways, it was an interesting read for me. It took me several years to figure out why the icon disappeared after I upgraded from a 386 to a 486. (Clearly an OS upgrade was involved.) Now I know why Microsoft made that change.
Just like the hamburger, or the 3 dots menu, or whatever a program manager thinks it shall be the symbol for a menu.
The point is: everything is learned (see discussions about intuitive interfaces in alt.sysadmin.recovery 20 years ago). If you change every couple of months the meaning of a symbol, nobody will know what that symbol means anymore.
You are also right about learning things, but also look at it from a different perspective: would a person have even realized that a hamburger menu did something 35 years ago, particularly with today's flat UIs?
bediger4000•8mo ago