I'll take a shot too. I don't use most of the fancy features on Github, so I have almost no experience with these things.
<> - code
! - warning / danger
|7 - merge a fork (or accept a pull)
E]E] - I think that might be a dictionary. Look something up?
_|^\_ - Heartbeat to let you know how active a project is.
|+. - Charts to see activity.
4 - Fork
>< - settings. Funny that it's a wrench and screw driver. Although I guess a keyboard and mouse would be a little less telling.
These seem bad because you can't get information about them before you interact. The icons are small, and kind of hard to make out (I had to turn my screen brightness up to see what was going on with that book one). But, once you get a little bit of experience with them (click them once), you'll have that icon (or just the order) ingrained in your brain. It sucks for people who aren't technical, or who are thrown into Github, but it's not bad for experienced users.
That is until next week when they decide they got the ordering wrong, and some of the icons wrong, and randomly swap and replace icons.
This kind of reminds me of the very challenging 'Is this thing I made hard to use for people who don't know what's going on?' It's a very hard problem - you, the creator, are designing and fabricating something that you want other people to use. You think you found a good way there, and you obviously found the best way because that's the way that you're going to build it. The path was obvious, we went from A to B to C back to B then to D, detoured to S for a while, didn't like the color sceheme, went back to D, then decided B was the best one. You have a lot of experience with alternate configurations, and have innate knowledge of how they work on the inside. Someone who comes up and uses D without any primer might be a little confused. Why do the colors matter here? Well, it's obvious, we went from A-B-C-B-D, it's a natural design evolution, ARE YOU TOO STUPID TO SEE IT!?!? You won't be one of my users... It's hard to distance yourself from what you're working on to see the flaws in your own design. It's very hard. It's easy to assume the knowledge you have, or the knowledge you as an organization have, will be present outside your group a priori. You don't know what they don't know, but you know what you know.
Regardless of whether or not you like the changes, Github has probably been following this 'design evolution' for a while, and they like where they're at, and assume you're smart enough to know beforehand what the icons do. Or, at the very least, smart enough to associate an icon with a topic related to git.
<> - code ! - warning / danger |7 - merge a fork (or accept a pull) E]E] - I think that might be a dictionary. Look something up? _|^\_ - Heartbeat to let you know how active a project is. |+. - Charts to see activity. 4 - Fork >< - settings. Funny that it's a wrench and screw driver. Although I guess a keyboard and mouse would be a little less telling.
These seem bad because you can't get information about them before you interact. The icons are small, and kind of hard to make out (I had to turn my screen brightness up to see what was going on with that book one). But, once you get a little bit of experience with them (click them once), you'll have that icon (or just the order) ingrained in your brain. It sucks for people who aren't technical, or who are thrown into Github, but it's not bad for experienced users.
That is until next week when they decide they got the ordering wrong, and some of the icons wrong, and randomly swap and replace icons.
This kind of reminds me of the very challenging 'Is this thing I made hard to use for people who don't know what's going on?' It's a very hard problem - you, the creator, are designing and fabricating something that you want other people to use. You think you found a good way there, and you obviously found the best way because that's the way that you're going to build it. The path was obvious, we went from A to B to C back to B then to D, detoured to S for a while, didn't like the color sceheme, went back to D, then decided B was the best one. You have a lot of experience with alternate configurations, and have innate knowledge of how they work on the inside. Someone who comes up and uses D without any primer might be a little confused. Why do the colors matter here? Well, it's obvious, we went from A-B-C-B-D, it's a natural design evolution, ARE YOU TOO STUPID TO SEE IT!?!? You won't be one of my users... It's hard to distance yourself from what you're working on to see the flaws in your own design. It's very hard. It's easy to assume the knowledge you have, or the knowledge you as an organization have, will be present outside your group a priori. You don't know what they don't know, but you know what you know.
Regardless of whether or not you like the changes, Github has probably been following this 'design evolution' for a while, and they like where they're at, and assume you're smart enough to know beforehand what the icons do. Or, at the very least, smart enough to associate an icon with a topic related to git.