I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
The place this confuses me the most is with twisties (the little arrows on accordion items or menu expanders). The can either show the current state or the action to transform the state and there's no consistency between providers.
I like the way Apple did it back in the day where they indicated the collapsed (vertical) state of an item with a horizontal arrow. i.e.
closed: ⇦
open: ⇩
Especially with a transitional animation, this helps alleviate some of the confusion. I think Apple have gone to the dark side on this since though. Switching between styles on a Mac and on a Google leads me to not trust any control I see and click everything at least once to discover what it does.
It's like when you search a form to see whether there's a save button or whether things are just going to update by magic. Sites and apps are so inconsistent in this that nobody is ever really sure if their changes are going to stick, and you end up closing and reopening the settings pages just to make sure.
Where I'm going with this is that I'm not sure at this point that there is a correct answer that's compatible with keeping terse buttons or pictographic icons, because the well has been thoroughly poisoned.
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The place this confuses me the most is with twisties (the little arrows on accordion items or menu expanders). The can either show the current state or the action to transform the state and there's no consistency between providers.
I like the way Apple did it back in the day where they indicated the collapsed (vertical) state of an item with a horizontal arrow. i.e.
Especially with a transitional animation, this helps alleviate some of the confusion. I think Apple have gone to the dark side on this since though. Switching between styles on a Mac and on a Google leads me to not trust any control I see and click everything at least once to discover what it does.
It's like when you search a form to see whether there's a
savebutton or whether things are just going to update by magic. Sites and apps are so inconsistent in this that nobody is ever really sure if their changes are going to stick, and you end up closing and reopening the settings pages just to make sure.Where I'm going with this is that I'm not sure at this point that there is a correct answer that's compatible with keeping terse buttons or pictographic icons, because the well has been thoroughly poisoned.