Iconography: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about iconography that come up most often on our calls.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Do we need to care about this?

Icons without labels are guessed wrong more often than teams assume. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

Decorative icons should be hidden from screen readers. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about iconography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Decorative icons should be hidden from screen readers — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.