Communicating with labels and icons

With digital interfaces, we need to communicate efficiently, because we have a…limited amount of space available on the screen, so we need to carefully choose…labels, and icons, and where they're placed.…Labels include navigation links, button text, image captions, and headers, and subheaders.…They communicate factual information, reflect the classification of that…information, and reveal the organization of the Web site or application.…Images and icons resemble, or portray the information and functionality they represent.…We rely on our memory, language, pattern recognition, and associations to…understand what we see and perceive.…

The navigation on a Web site is often hierarchical, and how the links and labels…are presented influence how we understand that hierarchy.…Two common techniques for representing this structure are indenting, and grouping.…Grouping related items, and simply indenting them visually communicates the hierarchy.…Labels and links that are indented below another are perceived as subordinate to it.…