Other icons frequently misunderstood by users include the heart and the star. These icons are often used to represent favorites, bookmarks, featured items, and ratings from other users. Not only does the precise functionality associated to these icons vary from site to site, but these two icons compete with each other. As a result, these icons and their exact meanings are hard to memorize and interpret precisely. For example, the heart icon on the vacations listing site Combadi allows users to mark that they “love” a trip, but does not save that trip to a short list to ease future referencing. (…) In contrast, the interior-design shopping site Fab uses the heart icon as a way for a user to save that item in order to find it easily later.

Related: Realism in UI Design.

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Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

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Lukas Mathis

Hi. My name is Lukas Mathis. I studied Computer Science/Software Engineering and Ergonomics/Usability at ETH Zürich. I work as a software engineer and user interface designer for a swiss software company creating process management software. I've written a book about usability. It's been translated to Chinese and Japanese. My first computer was a Performa 450, my first programming language was HyperTalk, my first electric guitar was a cheap Peavey, my first videogame was a VCS 2600 and my current snowboard is from Lib Tech. I live in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps, and you can reach me at or on twitter.

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Icon Usability