[dennis_vartan]

What about thinking of icons as visual anchors -- something to quickly "catch" your eye as you're looking for an operation? What if it doesn't matter what picture the icon has, as long as the shape is clearly recognizable?

Important to distinguish two types of users here:

(a) Someone unfamiliar with a UI will need more visual cues, textual hints, and so on. "What does this button/icon do?" Without helpful text, they may be stuck.

(b) But, someone who has used a particular piece of UI hundreds of times will simply zero in on an app by its icon's shape/color/position. In this case, it's much better to have many varying icons rather than pretty but similar-looking circles. And in this case, it doesn't actually matter what the icons portray.

The iOS 7 Safari icon, while unsightly, catches my eye every darn time. Is that its purpose? And, again, in iOS 7, is this why the gradients follow opposite directions?

Would love if anyone could point to more "science" in this, as I'm simply speaking from my observations.

[hayksaakian]

I was about to say the same thing with the same background (none)

If I need to open Gmail, I'm not just looking for the word "Gmail" in a list, I'm using a much more complex search algorithm.

I'm looking for:

- the distinctive red/gray lines

- a rectangle

- the word "gmail"

- words that start with f, or start with h

- a specific region of my screen, that I remember last housing this icon

[mmagin]

Continuing with "b", I think there's some benefit to having both distinct shapes and distinct colors (which often gets thrown out in modern design on high resolution, high color-depth displays -- you can have any color you want in the UI so long as it is blue, silver, or white!) Anecdotally, I think there are some people who distinguish shapes more quickly and others who distinguish colors more quickly.