I wish developers would put words next to their icons more often. Too many glyphs feel cryptic to me until I just try them at random to see what they do. A big example is the copy icon on Android that pops up. The word "copy" could've fit well there, and as a "high-level" experienced computer user I didn't know that the two papers side by side meant "copy". I actually thought it was "paste" at first. The hamburger buttons with a "more" or something on them probably fared better.
Generally, the reasoning behind not using text on a button (or wherever) is related to internationalization and locales.
Nascent software projects usually don't have the manpower or the budget to translate their user interfaces into multiple languages early in the game.
When tasked with coding a button labeled with text, many developers will simply hard-code the label onto the button, unless explicitly instructed to code the label as a reference to a separate resource of constants containing appropriate label strings.
This can be murder to re-develop, after the fact, when tasked with developing foreign language versions of the same software. You'll find that a team of ten developers have implemented a hundred different button labels, ten different ways, and sprayed them in a thousand places across the whole code tree, leading to partial and inconsistent translations, that need to be tested and re-tested in painstaking and tedious incremental iterations, and then you still have to dive back in and fix bug reports after releasing the translated version because you missed a spot.
To side-step this pitfall, and anticipate the potential for internationalization, one tactic is to implement languageless icons that define the look and feel of the interface. The drawback, of course, being that all users are confused equally, regardless of their native tongue.
Comments
I wish developers would put words next to their icons more often. Too many glyphs feel cryptic to me until I just try them at random to see what they do. A big example is the copy icon on Android that pops up. The word "copy" could've fit well there, and as a "high-level" experienced computer user I didn't know that the two papers side by side meant "copy". I actually thought it was "paste" at first. The hamburger buttons with a "more" or something on them probably fared better.
Generally, the reasoning behind not using text on a button (or wherever) is related to internationalization and locales.
Nascent software projects usually don't have the manpower or the budget to translate their user interfaces into multiple languages early in the game.
When tasked with coding a button labeled with text, many developers will simply hard-code the label onto the button, unless explicitly instructed to code the label as a reference to a separate resource of constants containing appropriate label strings.
This can be murder to re-develop, after the fact, when tasked with developing foreign language versions of the same software. You'll find that a team of ten developers have implemented a hundred different button labels, ten different ways, and sprayed them in a thousand places across the whole code tree, leading to partial and inconsistent translations, that need to be tested and re-tested in painstaking and tedious incremental iterations, and then you still have to dive back in and fix bug reports after releasing the translated version because you missed a spot.
To side-step this pitfall, and anticipate the potential for internationalization, one tactic is to implement languageless icons that define the look and feel of the interface. The drawback, of course, being that all users are confused equally, regardless of their native tongue.
I don't think lack of manpower applies to the Android OS so much. And even so, even only having English next to the icon is better than nothing.
Not so much, Android itself, as much as the apps developed for Android by third parties.
The copy button is quite obvious, -compared to a lot of others.
Even a C, X, and V next to the icons would've been better than nothing