[giantDinosaur]

How do you understand something like 'withdraw, with conversion' or 'withdraw, let your bank handle the conversion', without language? Is there an obvious image or button shape that'd signify this without prior knowledge? Curious, not sure I've seen an instance where this is obvious from any other cue.

To expand on this: the mapping between images and other cues to a precise meaning is often actually pretty poor. To correctly navigate using images you often have to have prior knowledge, with the exception of the most downright obvious images or visual cues possible. On the other hand, text can have essentially arbitrary precision (although past a certain point it becomes difficult to parse) - and is thus actually often superior for first-use (or infrequent use) scenarios. The ideal is to have the best communication possible, and while I'm not sure as to the extent that Uber reaches that goal, text being unreadable and the app being unnavigable because you changed the language is, in my view, more on you than on the app developers.

[karlp]

> How do you understand something like 'withdraw, with conversion' or 'withdraw, let your bank handle the conversion', without language? Is there an obvious image or button shape that'd signify this without prior knowledge?

Let's say you're in Europe and and have a card in dollars:

[] 1000€

[] 1000€ (1€/1.2$ -> 1200$)

[refactor_master]

And then it starts asking about card type, and which account, and... Just gimme the money!

But they’re usually designed in such a way that it’s impossible to hit a wall, and worst case you pay a $5 fee.

[giantDinosaur]

Right. Because you have numbers written in a common language, you can work out what your buttons did. Without that you wouldn't realise until you actually were hit with the conversion fee on one side or the other. If you changed the language and the numbers were written in Chinese, and then you blamed the ATM for being difficult to use without a translation app, how on earth is that not a problem with what you decided to do?

Anyway, I digress...

[wpietri]

For that example, I'd say the text wouldn't help most people regardless of language. One would have to know a fair bit about the mechanics of currency conversion. I happen to know that, and I still would have to pick randomly, because this would come down to exchange rates that the interface isn't exposing.

The correct user-focused interface solution for that particular problem is to show the actual costs next to each button. And then I'd think one would make the cheaper option the obvious default (e.g., bigger, greener), with the more expensive option less favored.

[rusk]

I do this all the time. I understand from context. I’m relying on the position, some annotation and previous experiences to know what’s going on.

This is good design and an illiterate person could be walked through this a few times and could then do it anywhere.

Bad design is relying on your users continually having to teach themselves how to use your app.