Topic on Talk:Compact Personal Bar

Should be resolved with next update.

I think the current set of icons (and also their descriptions) lack clarity:

• The "talk page" icon is a duplicate of the "Notifictions" icon. Therefore one thinks it has something to do with notifications. I didn't guess that it was related to my talk page in the first place.
• The "watchlist" icon is very ambiguous:
  It is basically a copy of the "add to watchlist icon"
  It is also used as "add to favorites" in Internet Explorer or "add to bookmarks" star icon in Firefox.
  Therfore this is exactly the functionality one expects: Adding something to watchlist, not opening the actual watchlist.
  • The second point is even made worse by the fact that the stars tooltip doesn't include the word "Watchlist". What is "A list of pages you are monitoring for changes"??? Just call the child by it's name! The tooltip isn't a help page after all...
• The "contributions" icon is very ambiguous:
  A bar diagram is normally used for statistics. Special:Contributions does not contain any statistics on Wikipedia though! It's a plain list of edits a user has made. This should be reflected by the icon.

Patrick87 Thanks for your feedback, as I mention in another thread the icons aren't finalized, and we wanted to release the beta feature so we could start getting feedback like yours. The talk page and echo icons are different (and we'll we thinking of ways to further differentiate them going forward)

Check out the updated sketch and give us feedback we've updated some of the icons to better differenciate them from exsisting icons.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I like all of these except the Contributions icon. The puzzle piece is in use elsewhere for Templates/Transclusions and I don't think we should give it more uses than that. Maybe one similar to the Watchlist but with the pencil icon instead of the star?

I should also mention that I really like the new Watchlist icon. That solves one of my biggest problems with the current interface.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): And one other thing: Will the Privacy, Help, and Logout (I personally prefer the term "sign out" :P) buttons get icons? If so, I just wanted to suggest using a power symbol for Logout, as I despise the door metaphor used by a number of websites.

Nicereddy, We created the contribs icon for another purpose (access to contribs elsewhere) and I think it might already be in-use. The Templates/Transclusions icon (I assume you've seen in VE?) is actually just a placeholder that will likely get replaced or redrawn.

As far as Privacy, Help, and Logout, Privacy and Help may get an Icon, still undecided. Logout however we were thinking about leaving icon-less to make it more visible.

I think that log out vs sign out is something that the Growth team did some validation with user on, but I can talk with them further.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): For the talks icon I just use a single rounded-corner speech bubble. These overlapping almost rectangular speech bubbles are too hard to recognize, IMHO. At least I had to actively look at the icons with the intention to find out what the icon is supposed to depict, to, in the end after 20 seconds, find out what it is supposed to depict. So, at least for me, the talk icon is not intuitive.

good feedback, we wanted to clarify that echo is one way communication (notifications) and that talk page is a conversation, hence the 1 speech bubble vs two, however I agree with you that the dual bubble icon can look a little muddled at that size, we might want to redraw an alternate small size version to help that.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): The updated sketch is much clearer already, thank you!

Two things still need some improvement:

• The double speech "bubbles" (I don't know if one can really call those rectangles bubbles) are still unclear as set out above. In fact most of the Echo icon-set could use some optimizations, too...
• The "Beta" icon is strange. This one looks as if an icon was created for the sake of having an icon but not for increased clarity.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): The updated version is better, but there are still some issues IMO...

• The beta icon is too similar to the preferences cog
• I agree that the contributions icon is a bit weird. I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be. Maybe a broken cog? Since contributions sort of means edits, I think using the pencil might work.

Thanks Steven (WMF), the contributions icon is a puzzle piece, it is/will be used on mobile soon as well, we can iterate on it if it is unclear at smaller sized.

The Beta Icon is supposed to be similar to preferences since it's a subset of preference, but we have an alternate Beta icon that is a bit more…fun. that we're planning on trying out.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I like the new icons; except the contributions icon. I would have made it a pencil with an overlapping list symbol (as in the watchlist icon).

Edokter, we thought about that, but we were trying to avoid using the pencil (edit) icon for something that didn't mean edit (the action)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): In the end the watchlist is exactly that: A list of edits. It would only be logical to use a similar symbol there.

For what it's worth I'd also prefer a pen with overlapping list symbol (which would increase consistency across icons, which is a good thing) instead of letting the user putting the puzzle pieces together to get the meaning of the contributions icon .

Patrick87 we'll keep thinking of some alternatives, feel free to propose your own as well (pencil with list, or whatever else you think of) the rational for the puzzle piece is the same as that of the wikipedia logo, that it is always in-progress and that each of our contributions adds to the whole.