Signs it is time to revisit iconography

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few signals that iconography is due some attention.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Icons without labels are guessed wrong more often than teams assume
• One icon set keeps stroke weight and corner radius consistent

The practical version

Decorative icons should be hidden from screen readers. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

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
• One icon set keeps stroke weight and corner radius consistent — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.