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ICONs on Buttons
I see that in the new UI you have ICONs beside the Button text for New, Print, Export, etc. Can I make the following suggestions
- give an option to show ICON only (very useful on small mobile screens)
- especially provide the ability to replace the buttons in the Actions column in Lists by ICONs. Saves screen width and useful on small mobile screens
- provide standard ICONs for View, Edit, Delete,

Thanks
ID
774
Category
User Experience
Author

Philipp Matuschka (MMB)
Date Created
10/14/2014 10:47:23 AM
Date Updated
11/22/2019 10:47:29 AM
Status
Implemented
Score
50
Promoted By
Nick AshcroftDale OliverIvan Papish
baseninePhilipp Matuschka (MMB)
Comments
Kirill Bondar  Staff  10/15/2014 4:58:59 AM
1. Text is already automatically hidden on screens less than 768px - you can test it even on desktop in any modern browser by reducing window width.

2. We wanted to do it in a little bit different way on a mobile devices - convert the set of buttons to a sort of dropdown. Also

As for icons as a way to improve UI readability - while feature looks simple at the moment it's somewhat technically complicated. Icons on buttons are not images, they are rather vector graphic to scale with the base font size (especially on retina displays). The only cross-browser way to display vector graphics is to use specially crafted font - not a big problem since there are many online tools for that. Next, again, cross-browser problem - to make it work you need to supply font in 4 various formats - EOT for IE8-, TTF for IE9+ and all the rest, WOFF as more compact TTF and finally SVG for old iOS/Android devices. So far so good but IE7 requires serious scaffolding to display icons and we have to evaluate each and every case to make sure it won't break the functionality.

All browsers except for IE are "evergreen" - only latest version is supported. As far as I heard, in one year Microsoft will change its browser support policy switching to an "evergreen" model as well - that's IE9 on Vista, IE10 on Windows 2008 server and IE11 on everything else. Also at this time old Android devices will fade away. IE9's feature set is good enough to compete with "latest and greatest". Then we'll be able to review the set of technologies available at our hands.
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 10/26/2014 9:05:23 AM
"1. Text is already automatically hidden on screens less than 768px - you can test it even on desktop in any modern browser by reducing window width."

Kirill: I had a look at this, and the text being hidden on small screens is not good. You end up with a little square and no idea what it means. I think you may need to have another look at that.

2. Thanks for the explanation for the technical challenges. However I think that the suggestions made above should still be possible, even with those challenges. If I had to chose one particular large screen wish it would be - especially provide the ability to replace the buttons in the Actions column in Lists by ICONs. Saves screen width and useful on small mobile screens"

Thanks

Kirill Bondar  Staff  10/27/2014 5:56:05 AM
@Philipp:

1. > the text being hidden on small screens is not good. You end up with a little square and no idea what it means

The text is automatically hidden only if there is an icon - that's what you have suggested to do via the separate option. If we hide text on a block with no icon that's definitely a bug - I'd ask for the location the issue occurred.

2. In any way we would like to keep it simple for public - that's either to wait until old browsers are gone and we can use a single supported baseline for icons or to create some process to hide all the technical challenges. At the moment, as IE7 shows, we can kick it in for a dozen of own icons but we still can't make support generic.

We'll keep it on our radar for a while.
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 10/28/2014 8:29:07 AM
Kirill:The text is automatically hidden only if there is an icon - that's what you have suggested to do via the separate option.
Philipp: Has this option been implemented?

Kirill: If we hide text on a block with no icon that's definitely a bug - I'd ask for the location the issue occurred.
Philipp: Login from Windows Mobile. On the very top right of the screen where Support and Setup appear on a fullscreen, on the small screen there are just two little boxes. I would have thought that at least the text could appear.

Kirill Bondar  Staff  10/28/2014 9:05:45 AM
@Philipp: Windows Mobile or Windows Phone? Windows Mobile is quite old and buggy and we do not support it at all. It definitely works on Windows Phone 8.1 yet we have not tested it on older versions. What version do you have?
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 10/31/2014 5:35:15 AM
Windows Phone 7
Kirill Bondar  Staff  10/31/2014 6:18:06 AM
@Philipp: WP7 claims to support custom fonts (icons) but does not load font files - described here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thebeebs/archive/2011/12/14/font-face-isn-t-working-on-ie9-inside-of-windows-phone-7.aspx

It looks like we'll need another brute force hack for icons :)
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 10/31/2014 7:03:06 AM
Kirill. Life is tough. For the moment however, if I am the only WP7 user, and this really is not a problem on WP8, don't prioritise this. Most of my user base will either be Android, IOS or WP8 and I will be moving to WP8 soon also.
Kirill Bondar  Staff  11/10/2014 4:11:55 AM
@Philipp: we should no longer hide the text if icons are not supported.
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 11/11/2014 2:46:04 AM
That looks much better. Thank you
Ivan Papish 9/28/2017 6:10:15 PM
It would be great to be able to add icons to the buttons.
For example if in the URL column I want to display the facebook link as a button, would be nice to have the opportunity to display it as a facebook icon instead of text.
basenine 4/23/2018 4:57:35 PM
BUMP ** As per @Ivan
>It would be great to be able to add icons to the buttons.

When creating a button, have a list of standard icons to use (either via drop list or radio button)

Adding a Print icon to a Document Print button, for example, would clear confusion with naming.
Also have an option to show with or without text
Kirill Bondar  Staff  12/14/2018 7:46:47 AM

Robert Gustavsson 12/19/2018 8:19:22 AM
This is a cute addition, but its sad that more basic and important functionality has not been implemented after all these years, including translation/renaming of button names.
Nick Ashcroft 1/22/2019 3:23:31 AM
the icons are a welcome addition. However I would like the functionality extended to

- allow blank button names (and allow duplicates) or, if not possible, to hide the name in the view/form and use the icon only
- allow duplicate names in combination with different icons (the combination of icon+name should be unique, not only name)
- use own icons

can you explain how the icon name search works - it seems very weird how it matches ?!

thanks
Nick
Nick Ashcroft 1/29/2019 6:58:59 AM
- also adding icons to / in place of
-- table names to be shown on tabs.
-- dashboards and views on left menu

Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 6/5/2019 6:23:00 AM
Hi
I just tried icons today. Looks great except that it displays both the icon and the text. Would it be possible to have an option that when an icon has been selected, it can display with or without the text.
Thanks
Jorge Solá 6/7/2019 7:02:42 PM
I second both Nick's & Philipp's suggestions.
Kirill Bondar  Staff  11/7/2019 5:48:02 AM
Added icons to tables, views and dashboards. Added an option to hide text to tables, buttons and documents.

As for duplicate names - text is important for visually impaired users. Allowing duplicate names will left them confused.
Robert Gustavsson 11/7/2019 7:28:02 AM
Nice. Next step could be icons for columns.
Robert Gustavsson 11/18/2019 2:29:04 AM
... and form sections.
Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 11/19/2019 9:31:28 AM
Hi Kirill

This is fantastic. The next step in my view would be to have help text which appears when hovering over the button so that a user can know what the effect of pressing the button will be before he presses it


Philipp Matuschka (MMB) 11/22/2019 10:47:29 AM
With the Icons, I see that where an icon is present on a button, then on a small screen only the icon shows. Could the same be done for the icons on the tabs?
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