I think that a combination of both works well also, especially if the icon enhances the meaning of the text and the text enhances the meaning of the icon.
Where the whole icon thing sort of works, is with tools where the words won’t be able to communicate what a tool means anyways and. when there are too much for (e.g. the tools in photoshop)
> I think that a combination of both works well also, especially if the icon enhances the meaning of the text and the text enhances the meaning of the icon.
It's also a neat way to resolve issue with text-only buttons in multilingual software. From time to time, I find myself in front of an OS, an app or a website that's familiar to me, but is set to a language I don't know. Having an icon next to the text is very helpful then. That said, it's a rare case, so if I had to choose just one, I'd prefer text over icons.
Yeah I agree. Photoshop also "benefits from" being an application of mostly power users who are willing to ramp up and learn icons and keyboard shortcuts.
Imagine that users of an NHS website are infrequent at best with a large number of new users.
Almost all tools can be summarized with one word [1]: Marquee, Move, Lasso, *Magic Wand, Heal, Paintbrush, Clone, Stencil, Eraser, Paintbucket, Smudge, Dodge/Burn, Path, Text, Pen, Shapes, Hand, Eyedrop, Hand, Zoom.
Aren't those are summaries of the icons, not the tools? I'm struggling to come up with a concise and accurate way of describing the abstract actions of magic wand and heal, they might as well have been called foo and bar. I'd argue that you need to know what the icon means to know what the tool does - since you come across the icon first - and so would tautologically know what icon to look for to get the tool you want.
Where the whole icon thing sort of works, is with tools where the words won’t be able to communicate what a tool means anyways and. when there are too much for (e.g. the tools in photoshop)