[mr3martinis]

It’s not universal, so we’ll remove all icons?

Even if they couldn’t identify a universally understood icon, an existing user can recognize a familiar symbol faster than text, and symbols at least provide some clue that isn’t dependent on English comprehension.

[II2II]

The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time. It was culturally, not even linguistically, dependent. The footnote even suggests that it was a relatively new symbol in computer interfaces, having been introduced some 8 months earlier in NextSTEP. Adding to the difficulty: some people couldn't identify the simplistic icon as a magnifying glass.

English compression was not an issue here. The buttons would have been translated.

Anyways, it was an interesting read for me. It took me several years to figure out why the icon disappeared after I upgraded from a 386 to a 486. (Clearly an OS upgrade was involved.) Now I know why Microsoft made that change.

[hulitu]

> The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time

Just like the hamburger, or the 3 dots menu, or whatever a program manager thinks it shall be the symbol for a menu.

The point is: everything is learned (see discussions about intuitive interfaces in alt.sysadmin.recovery 20 years ago). If you change every couple of months the meaning of a symbol, nobody will know what that symbol means anymore.

[II2II]

To be fair to Microsoft, this was in their help system. They probably wanted to be as clear as possible, to avoid confusing people in an application that was supposed to help people. It is not as though they were removing icons from all applications. It was also a time when companies were exploring how to present GUIs and many people were much more timid about experimenting with computers. Where people today become frustrated with constantly changing interfaces, people then were more likely to fear breaking things.

You are also right about learning things, but also look at it from a different perspective: would a person have even realized that a hamburger menu did something 35 years ago, particularly with today's flat UIs?

[JadeNB]

> Even if they couldn’t identify a universally understood icon, an existing user can recognize a familiar symbol faster than text, and symbols at least provide some clue that isn’t dependent on English comprehension.

Of course any such decision will be a balancing act, but I can certainly imagine that an unexpected or confusing symbol would be genuinely confusing or frightening to a new user (think how early this was in mass-market computing!), and that an experienced user (1) can re-learn, (2) anyway probably doesn't have to re-learn muscle memory still gets them to the right place, and (3) is more likely to be invested in the system than a new user, so that it might be considered less essential to invest in keeping them than in bringing on new users.