Having identical text of “Mi…” repeated next to every Microsoft program doesn’t help the you find your application. It provides no value and slows you down. Just look at this, this mess isn’t improving usability:
It’s even worse than it looks at face value, because when text labels are showing (a very loose definition of “showing”), you get no actual text when you hover over those icons, so the single letter or two is now all you get. Great.
Showing text when there is room for it is not a bad idea, sure. That’s why Windows has an option to “combine when taskbar is full”. Especially if you use dozens of programs throughout your day, the taskbar can accommodate those better as icons. But forcing it into a jumbled mess isn’t helping you.
There’s a reason every operating system in use today uses icons and graphics as representations of programs and functions like settings or media. Be it your phone, tablet, laptop, PC, or gaming console, you’ll see icons. Human brains are incredibly skilled at recognizing shapes and colors, far faster than reading text descriptions.
Google’s stock Android implementation has recently provided a new home screen option to set all your icons to use your theme color. And while it looks uniform, it actually undermines usability. Even when all the icons have text labels, you’ll find that it takes longer to locate an app, even one you use constantly. Things get lost in the sea of sameness.
The additional cognitive load of these excessive labels just adds to the time to task completion. If it was really more efficient, you’d launch your programs from a text list with no graphical representation at all, a practice that is never seen in the wild.
