I have a severe distaste for icons. Look at HN, there's zero thinking involved outside of reading a language. You know exactly what something does, and it can easily be multilingual as a result. I'm hoping the next big trend in design focuses on minimalist interfaces. Nothing but text, and some photos if needed. So tired of all the fluff, particularly on small phone screens.
I don't hate icons, per se. I just find them hard to use. For whatever reason, I have to think about icons a lot more than words, even after I'm very familiar with them.
Watching others, most folks don't seem to have this problem - words and icons seem about equally fluid for them. And I'm fine if they don't move - I remember them by location. But I'm very slow to 'read' icons.
The most common situation that highlights this is tab-application-switching. Those are never in the same order twice, and I have to stare at them until I can pick out the icon of the app I'm thinking of. I've looked for hacks that would replace the icons with words, but haven't seen one, at least on MacOS.
I absolutely have the same problem. I think other people do to, but now I'm not sure if I've observed this or I'm just assuming other people have the same problems as me.
Text is very difficult for UI layouts, especially on small screens, and especially for lower-vision users, since (a) words take up more space than icons, (b) different languages have different length words.
