Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

Summary

I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post.I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”.Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu).It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.Tahoe now has icons in menus everywhere. For example, here’s the Apple menu:Let’s look at others. As I’m writing this I have Safari open. Let’s look at the “Safari” menu:Hmm. Interesting. Ok so we’ve got an icon for like half the menu items. I wonder why some get icons and others don’t?For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why? Especially when Safari has an icon for Privacy report, like if you go to customize the toolbar you’ll see it:Hmm. Who knows? Let’s keep going.Let’s look at the "File" menu in Safari:Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other g...