Within a second of seeing the 'improved' ones I spot what is, to my mind at least, an immediate failure - the detail resolution is far too small. It doesn't account for the printing limitations on small fabric tags, never mind the ability of old fogeys such as myself to be able to squint that hard and actually read them.
I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supposed to be, and the numerals in the three thereafter are only legible because I'm staring at a bright screen, not swearing into the void in my laundry room, trying to find a better light.
All that aside, I feel I'd still have to look their new interpretations up. International visual vernacular .. doesn't really exist.
I really find the idea that "having to know, or lookup stuff", as a problem, offensive.
Laundry is literally filled with things to know, outside of these symbols. Household tasks are.
I don't see labels on bleech bottles, saying not to mix it with vinegar or you could die. Yet people have done that in the wash, so why not start there?
Here's what each sane person should do, who actually takes time to look at tags. (after all if you couldn't care less, and never look at tags, what's the point?)
Print a copy of the extended tag list out, and hang it in the laundry room at home. I have a cabinet where I keep extra detergent, etc, so I taped it up on the inside of the door.
Problem sovled.
For a laundrymat, for your smartphone, download a properly formatted, for easy phone viewing version.
Done.
Non-problem, compared to expecting the entire planet to change. We don't need another standard!!
All that would happen is I'd have two standards to look at.
I came here to make the same point you did. The originals are superior, largely because their open design will remain legible after significant deterioration. The slight increase in obviousness of the redesign is not worth the loss in legibility. I still don’t know what most of the new symbols are supposed to mean.
Also, I missed a link to a legend for the original design, for which the author’s animated version does not compensate.
There isnt much point in making a competing standard as we already know what happens (more confusion, more fractured knowledge, etc.)
Instead, just print a laundry chart and leave it with the washer.
As for whitegoods manufacturers: they could, as a minimum, describe their various wash and dry settings using the appropriate symbols rather than marketing terms.
Yeah, also the mercury thermometer sideways?! It's counter-intuitive. That said, the new symbolism slightly improves upon the old one which is not intuitive at all. You have to learn what they mean and then they're fine. They're just not intuitive.
The water temp in the old one is expressed much more clearly than the new one.
The most significant improvement is the bleach/no bleach symbol. The rest either don't improve much or actually make things less legible.
Also, sidenote the "drying" symbol looks a bit like the hotsprings/onsen symbol --the official symbol is a little diff as it has an oval, but on roadsigns they drop the oval sometimes so it looks very similar (see U+2668)
So I wear reading glasses and I’m with you the first 9 “improved” icons are indistinguishable to me at a glance. In particular the older ones with 20/30/50 are instantly readable where the new ones are not.
The iconography is updated which is nice but the line weights are too thick.
I think they are a lot more intuitive than the old ones, but I'd need to look up some stuff. I don't know what's the difference between normal, perm press and delicate for example. Or why the 3 knobs on the washing machine should represent it
The flask for bleach, and the drying symbols are much clearer though.
The detail in some is a bit too high for some clothing tags, I'd agree on that.
I don't think they did real world testing on the "improved" ones. I'd say it's obvious the number thirty could use a degree sign after it, but making it smaller and putting a box around it instead of in water, makes zero sense to me.
The failure of this UI/UX "expert" to grasp this most basic common sense detail is why modern websites and applications are generally speaking top-heavy UI/UX disasters.
Over the last 15 years or so I think we've taken a few giant steps backwards as we let freewheeling artists take over. Yet go back to the early 80s and look at the original Macintosh UI which was designed by an artist - Susan Kare - with complete elegance and simplicity. What has happened? Just because computers have increased in speed doesn't mean the complexity of the artwork must increase proportionally - often at the expense of usability.
I know a few of the symbols, mostly to check if I can actually stick the clothes I'm buying in a washing machine or if they are effectively a single use item (for me).
After checking I can wash them, the most important value after that would be the temperature, which is no longer readable.
I say that, but I stick everything at 30 anyway... (Alright, some things I know are safe to wash at 60deg, like bathroom towels, so they get the extra heat)
They are way more recognizable. When I looked at the example label at the end I immediately knew what all those new symbols meant. I still didn’t know what the original ones meant on the left.
Wow! The new icons have unacceptably small details, and I'm not sure how that's not obvious to even non-designers. And yet the author claims their set puts usability in front of beauty, as opposed to the originals? I don't usually write this negatively, but this really provoked an emotional reaction in me. Self-evidence is only one desirable quality of iconography, and it is not the most important one. Legibility is the most important one. If I can't read the details, or they easily wear off or fade, then it doesn't matter how self-describing they are. Sometimes you have to increase abstraction to increase legibility at the cost of increased learning. This is a common and accepted practice throughout the universe of symbology for excellent reasons.
Edit: Another advantage of high legibility is speed. Even if I have a tag where the new symbols are legible, I won't be interpreting them as quickly as the original symbols, under the precondition that I am already familiar with each set of symbols.
Edit: I think the reason this provoked me is that I have run into cases where this attitude toward design created bad real world experiences, so I immediately want to warn away from it as soon as I see it even in a hypothetical case.
Something that seems a bizarre change is the iron one, almost makes me wonder if this is someone that ever irons clothes. Going from dots to a thermometer?
1) Irons have respective dots on them. I can look at the clothes, look at the iron, and turn the temperature dial to the matching setting. I'm not playing guessing games of "where on the dial is 1/3rd?", there's a literal dot that matches the symbol.
2) The temperature symbols now go from easy to distinguish to confusing, especially when smaller and lighting not so great. Is it a 1/3 of the way through? 2/3rs? Counting dots is way, way easier and quicker.
Some of these are better (the bleach one being the most obvious) but most of them are worse or neutral. If I don't know what a line under the washing machine means, how am I supposed to know what the 2nd button means. The line is at least more visible.
It's similar for the iron. Maybe dots as temperature isn't obvious, but it's about as clear as the thermometer, is easy to read, and matches the icons on the iron itself.
It’s really not. It looks like an Erlenmeyer flask, which could contain anything (“use detergent”? “Use additives”? There are lots of things that come up in bottles in my laundry room).
I found the ones about drying to be better, probably because the original ones were way too abstract.
> If I don't know what a line under the washing machine means, how am I supposed to know what the 2nd button means.
Exactly! I don’t know what pushing the 2nd button on my washing machine does, either. Hell, my washing machine does not have anything that looks like the buttons of the symbols. And good luck trying to guess which one of the three buttons is filled after 5 washes, when the presence of one or two lines will still be clear.
The dots on the iron are blatantly obvious for anyone that’s used an iron or is about to use an iron because they are marked on the iron’s temperature control. That’s the beauty of standards. Similarly a lot of the symbols are marked on your washer or dryer
To me it looks like neither you nor the designer have ever used an iron on their clothes. Every iron I have ever seen had one, two and three dot markings at the appropriate positions on the temperature dial.
I think the dots / temp gauge should be combined here. 1 dot / 2 dots / 3 dots. The temperature gauge is hard to tell how full/empty it is which the dots help with, and single dots make it difficult to remember whether left or right means low or high.
The bleach one slightly reduces front loaded friction (ie. don't need to learn it) at the expense of being less legible, harder to print cleanly, less robust to fading and uglier. The others don't even really have the first benefit.
Which is exactly in line with 'good' ui design in software. So goal achieved, I guess.
To me the redesign shows how good the originals were.
Eg, in some cases the redesign uses the 'dots' motif for strength of effect, and yet in others it uses a 'thermometer'. Just inconsistent, and actually even less intuitive.
I have always found laundry symbols confusing. I agree with other comments that this proposed replacement has too many problems to be acceptable, but surely someone can do better than "crossed-out triangle", "underlined water cup", "Cylon wearing a jaunty cap", and my personal favorite, "literally just a circle".
Weird fact: Despite having been around for decades, laundry symbols have not been assigned Unicode code points. This mailing list email from Ken Whistler in 2003[1] suggests the existence of a conflicting Canadian standard as a reason, along with a philosophy of not including "icons" (especially color-coded ones!) in a "character" set, given that pictographic language is likely to change over the next century.
(Unicode threw that out the window in 2010 when they standardized emojis, and given how complex emojis have become Ken's argument is sounding better and better...)
There's nothing wrong with the symbols. Your washing machine is the one that should have a printed table of them somewhere.
Take a look on those symbols: "A", "B", "C". A triangle with the basis moved up, two circles with a straight side, and an open circumference arc. They were abstract into complete meaningless, yet they are great for their use-case.
So many laundry tags have OTT requirements. I have hoodies that claim dry clean only, but of course come out completely fine in the machine. Lots of bras say hand wash only but we've never had any issues with them in the machine either.
Generally, we just ignore the labels and put all the clothes in a colour separated wash on the 30c daily eco cycle. If the clothes get damaged - which is rare in a modern non-agitator washing machine - we just don't buy that type of fabric/garment any more. It does reduce the clothing options a little bit, for example, no silk, but it's worth the improved quality of life. Laundry Darwinism.
There are a few types of necessary item we do get dry cleaned, such as expensive suits and ball gowns, but at least for us those are rare use.
The other thing that has improved our life a lot is only buying non-iron clothing.
It’s a decent start, but without testing, there’s no evidence that these icons are any better than the originals.
I’m not sure that they even meets the authors own objectives — there are more small details that are harder to resolve at small sizes and likely would be harder to print clearly. They also aren’t any more “googleable” than the originals.
Lastly, they also assume that users are familiar with front loading washing machines, which may not be common in some places. It could easily be interpreted as a tumble dryer.
Agreed. I wonder whether something like a QR code that takes you to a page with instructions is more simple as a solution. Hook that up to a smart washing machine, and it will set the appropriate instructions, or tell you if you have an incompatible load.
All that said, I've been ignoring the labels for years, and never had a problem.
Even if they didn't try to pack in too much detail, I still think many of the redesigned symbols are less obvious than the originals. A square with a circle in it - is that the washer or the dryer? They're both boxes with round doors for most people these days. But the tub of water - at least I know intuitively that must mean washing. Similarly a conical flask for bleach - I guess I know that's something chemical, but is it bleach or dry cleaning? Whereas a triangle is always a warning, so it's not hard to associate with the only toxic thing in the laundry room. All irons I've ever used have dots on the temperature scale, not a half-filled old school thermometer, so that's also one that doesn't need improving. I'm not saying there's no room for improvement - the wavy lines for drying are certainly better than another ambiguous box with a circle in it - but many of the originals are pretty good.
I liked the case study, but I think what the author is missing is that the symbols in use today accommodate many different printing techniques across the garment and textile industries. If everything was done using sublimation, then sure, you could use more complex symbols. But that's not the case.
What's the big deal, these are all very intuitive:
no triangles
adidas
square
one squared
new document minus
equality
pig snout
squaring the circle
an eye looking through a square hole
square minus
do not square the circle
iron
iron.
iron..
iron...
iron deficiency
n/a
please fill in the entire circle or your answer will not be counted
OP has a point but the alternatives he provides are a bit worse from my perspective.
Also, why not putting the old and new icons side by side? For an UX designer that is policing on others, the animated GIF that you can't control with a fast transition was a very poor choice.
The new ones are just as inscrutable as the old ones. How on earth am I supposed to know a washing machine with the middle button of three dark means "permanent press" and the right button of three means "delicate" without looking it up? The new "natural dry" looks like it means "safe for high heat". "Do not bleach" looks more like "do not use detergent".
Frankly I think symbols that give you no impression at all are better than symbols that give you the wrong impression.
I wonder if the reason they don't make sense is the lack of common appliances and 'plastic dry cleaning covers' around the globe. Every iron has a dot-based temperature setting (alongside others, generally), but not everyone knows what a mercury thermometer looks like or if that means 'temperature setting'.
My whole adult life, I've ignored all laundry labels and just followed recommendations on the dial of the washer also, crucially, I've learned to assiduously avoid attempting to wash or dry any of my wife's clothes as that requires careful inspection of each item with dire consequences for each mistake.
Curious about those middle temperature settings. It seems like a lot of levels: 70C, 60C, 50C, 40C. What fabric would be fine at 40C, but 50C would be "too hot"?
I mean, I understand that some synthetics or wool would have a problem with extreme heat like 95C, and some might need to be at room temp for color to stay. But beyond that, isn't one "middle level" enough?
The idea of using these symbols instead of printed English is that not everybody speaks English, yes? Well, I don't speak Spanish, but I think if all of these symbols were replaced with printed Spanish words, it would be more useful to me than any of these symbols. I'd figure out what it meant with greater ease than these symbols; at the very least I would be able to look up the meaning.
And if you're going to have the symbols and printed text, you might as well omit the symbols entirely. I think both sets of symbols are worthless. I could probably guess what some of them mean if my life depended on it, but I'm not going to. Deciphering symbols is a waste of my time. At least if printed Spanish were used, puzzling out the meaning would actually enrich my life. The symbols are worthless noise and I don't want their meaning wasting space in my brain.
The original symbols were _engineered_. These new symbols are _designed_. There's a difference, and this falls into the same shortcomings of many modern UI designers: they only design for what appeals to them personally.
The difference between their “Mild drying process” and “normal drying process” is nearly impossible to perceive on a screen with the only difference being a few extra pixels on a thermometer. Pretty important to understand the difference between those if you like clothes that fit.
I wonder why they felt it necessary to keep everything as a single icon? Wouldn’t be as impossible to print/stitch or read if the icons were larger nouns + modifiers.
Huh. I'm not the one doing laundry in our household, and I still know all the four symbols that were hand-drawn on the paper there.
To remember that the circle is dry cleaning it helps to know that it can circumscribe letters indicating what type of dry cleaning process is allowed.
The tumble dry symbol just looks like a tumble dryer, and the washing symbol the same. Bleach is the tricky one but can be remembered because it's not one of the others.
I just have a symbol guide printed out and laminated next to the laundry machine. After referencing it enough times eventually you memorize it. No big deal.
I don't do this yet but this was my first reaction to seeing this page.
The originals are a bit cryptic when you don't know them, but simple and easy to memorize and even easier to match against a printed sheet next to your washing machine.
I will go and make one sheet for me now.
In fact, this is the stuff that should be part of a high-school curriculum!
I can totally get behind the value of a design exercise in revisiting popular symbols, but one thing I rarely (and unfortunately) see is an admission that the originals are better. Tags wear out and tag print size varies, which the originals account for in their simple distinguishable shapes. And the learning curve is negligible, as you allude to.
This post reminds me of when a junior dev refactors a bit of code that they now find to be well-crafted and intelligible simply because it came from their own mind. However, the result is often just as esoteric and convoluted, or it's even worse!
Just as a reminder: Nothing is context-free. Even, if something may appear self-explanatory to you, there's always convention involved to some degree.
E.g., does this symbol mean do not pack the cleaned cloth in a nylon envelope, or does it mean no dry cleaning? Is this an artificial heat source, or "natural dry"? Or is it the smelly process (bleaching)? Is this a closed chemical or recycling process, or tumbling? Also, the dot system is probably easier to identify and discern and more resistant to wear than the depiction of thermometers (which probably only work relative to each other, having something to compare with).
Moreover, icons like these are not app icons on the home screen: they do not work best, if they (or their constituting elements) are all of even weight. Eye-sight, lighting conditions and ease of identification are primary aspects of this. Something like this should probably work by a primary context identifier, conveyed by the shape, and a secondary qualifier ("specificator") inside that shape with convenient separating whitespace around it.
As someone else points out, it would be best if these were included in the washing machine in some form. Printed somewhere. In reality these icons are quite good and once you know the "basics" it is easy to know which one stands for what, so I think in terms of design they are actually quite clever.
In fact, now that I've seen the meaning of each one of them I think I might start to recognise them better :)
Does anyone not care about these symbols? There could be so many permutations of options in a pile of clothing that you’d end up having to do so many loads. I just throw everything in and hope for the best.
I think I’d argue that it’s beneficial in this case to lean towards abstract figures which must be looked up. What the designer calls intuitive, I might argue is actually easier to misinterpret.
One must remember that these are international symbols and the cultural context you bring to interpretation is different from another’s.
The key assumption with this redesign is basically the same as with the old one: we are supposed to immediately understand what this icon is supposed to mean. However, what will our assumptions about things be in about 50 years, which is how long the previous icons existed? Will we even recognize a washing machine with its porthole as such or will it be the case of a 3.5" floppy as a "Save" icon, which has confused people for the last 15 years?
And besides that: do we really need new icons? Make an app which will recognize and interpret the icons and you are done without making several gigantic industries replace well-known and well-working pieces of their daily work.
Not sure why this post is perceived with so much negativity here. I totally agree with the original author that the labels are a disaster. Whether the redesign is very much practical on low resolution is debatable, but I find the general idea commendable.
So many comments even straight out dismissing the necessity of the labels altogether, which 1. is not the point at all and 2. would definitely not be the sentiment from those who are actually in charge of the laundry and care about taking care their clothes well over the years.
Maybe HN doesn’t necessarily have the intended audience for this kind of post then.
It's a lost cause, looking for 'intuitive' symbols. It depends on your culture, your experiences, heck your generation. Just look at the symbols for 'save' (a floppy disk) or 'make a call' (an old phone handset). Kids just have to memorize them, they mean nothing 'intuitively'.
I liken these attempts at symbol sets, to ancient hieroglyphics - a different picture-writing for everything. Even the Egyptians gave up and turned to phonetic spelling.
Just write the instructions on the tag. Or heck, put a 2D scan code there and my phone will tell me what to do.
But then you need different labels for different markets, and even then often lots of different languages on the same label. That's the whole point of using symbols instead: they are universal.
At least in theory. In the real world labels do contain instructions in multiple languages, and I do read those instead of trying to decipher the symbols.
For me the biggest problem with laundry symbols is that they're often printed so small that after a few washes they become too blurry to recognize.
Also, while I can feel with my hand whether water is "cold," "warm," or "hot." I honestly have no idea what the actual temperature of the water in my washer is in degrees Celsius.
Furthermore, I live in the US (which is not where any of my clothes are made), so there's the added step of trying to convert the degrees from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
> Also, while I can feel with my hand whether water is "cold," "warm," or "hot." I honestly have no idea what the actual temperature of the water in my washer is in degrees Celsius.
The explicit temperatures are for machine washing, don't you just... set the washing temperature to whatever you want?
If you're washing by hand, it's unlikely that you're washing above 40C, and that's if you like hurting yourself: at 50C (120F) serious burns take about 10mn, at 60C (140F) it's around 3 seconds.
The new icons are bad. There are small distinguishing details that are hard to notice at small sizes. The icons need to be more simple, concrete, and recognizable.
The redesign is to much of the author's local iconography, it is less "global" than the original.
The worst offender being the representation of a front loading washing machine, while most of the developing world uses top loading washing machines. In my country all those "washing machine" icons would be incorrectly read as tumble dryer icons because here washers are top loaded and dryers are front loaded.
How are the proposed ones more legible, particularly at small scales?
How is embedding a representation of what a washing machine looks like now makes them more universal or recognisable?
Despite the couple of paragraphs pontificating about what good icons should be, most of them are much worse than the cleaner, simpler, older ones. The drying ones are more descriptive, but less legible.
I think these are definitely better. Especially bleach and dry clean.
The originals are too abstract. Unless you memorise them you basically have to look them up every time. Which is probably why most clothes also have English text telling you what to do on the label.
The new ones obviously have too small details to print on a typical label but I think that could be fixed fairly easily.
Arabic numerals make no sense. Kanji makes no sense. The Roman alphabet makes no sense. Of course, they're symbols. You memorize them. They stand for the object they're pointing at. They're not abstractions meant to represent directly the thing its self.
While I agree that the original icons are quite confusing they are incredibly googleable and they are also printed in manuals everywhere and super easy to match. More importantly there are apps like Laundry Lens which can reliably detect them and explain them.
The author has a point that a redesign could be more intuitive and understandable. Unfortunately the provided redesigns don't fit the bill.
There's some decent ideas here though. The shape of the bleach bottle, the circular motion of the arrows indicating tumble, a thermometer, and a dry cleaning bag. Unfortunately, the execution isn't as good as it should be. The strokes are too thick, and detailing is too crowded.
If anything, this is a decent first draft. But I would send it back with notes. The most important one being: less is more. And it's okay to leave existing icons alone that already work. Perhaps redesign within the constraints of the existing style, rather than creating a new style?
If you really want people to understand, it should probably be just arabic numerals. They're almost universally understand, and then you can just look it up in your language or print out the chart and put it next to the machine.
I would refer the author of this piece to read about Chesterton’s Fence, and then think about it in context of the subject of his article.
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
I'm adding custom NFC tags to all my laundry with encoded washing instructions, color and material data. Placing laundry in "smart" basket will read all data from them (this part is currently more involved, as you need to scan each article of clothing separately), and send instructions to washing machine for most optimal program (that's a problem too, as I do not own "smart" washing machine, yet). If there are some outliers, e.g. black shirt in otherwise white-ish laundry - I will be informed to remove it, for best results.
All this article has really convinced me is that a sticker explaining what all the laundry symbols are would be a good use of the flat top of washing machines/dryers.
> Laundry symbols make no sense
So I redesigned them, with all due respect.
Another failed GUI designer. If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them. Why repeat the Windows GUI experience ? I get that the first phones were slow and doing things in Java didn't help and recognizing that the GUI is crap would not help with market adoption, but let's not pretend that Material design or reinventing a GUI every two years is innovative.
> If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them
The thesis is that they don't work, at all. I have to look them up every time because they are absolutely inscrutable today. Laundry symbols are rarely looked at for most folks, so they have to be maximally communicative. It's not good enough if the only people that know what they mean are those that deal with them constantly.
In addition to all of these symbols I would like to see just a simple "type 1, type 2, type 3, type 4" OVERALL code added to each thing. If something is a type1 that could mean cold wash machine okay, tumble dry low, iron low/medium. A type 4 could be the fragile stuff - hand wash only cold water, mild detergent, no iron, no tumble dry. These wouldnt encompass everything but at least we could have a very quick guide to memorize.
I wish more designers would learn how to more objectively assess whether their work will have positive or negative value. It's kind of like how the lesson that tic tac toe taches kids has nothing to do with the strategy of the game. The usual exercise-in-futility assignment for design students is to redesign a toaster or a ladder, but clearly there are a lot of them who don't really get the point.
I have a chart with all the symbols printed out next to the laundry machine.
In most cases it's pretty obvious how a fabric should be washed just based on the feel of the material. In cases where it isn't, I've got the chart up in the one place I do laundry. Most launder mats I've been to have the same chart on the wall somewhere.
I'm not sure why memorizing is so bad in this case.
A very interesting exercise, but I believe the old symbols are not that hard to getting acquanted with. My mom explained them to me... what, three decades ago? Of course I don't remember most of them, but I usually buy the same types of clothes so I basically always use the same program.
Additionally, laundry & ironing professionals have those symbols more than memorized ;)
I don't check except for the occasional fancy shirt and even then it's only for iron temperature which is clear enough.
Dyes, machines and laundry detergent all changed for the better. I haven't inadvertently made things pink in 20 years now. The red now holds. Even new jeans come prewashed. My machine seems to be much gentler too.
Labels are dated, please forget making the icons better.
According to Statista, 80% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. Just add a link to the instructions and have translations in plain language that are standardized; that is manufactures/brands just reuse the standard types of instructions that are relevant.
What happens when the garment manufacturer or the URL shortener they used to reduce the complexity of the QR code goes out of business? I've experienced this before.
come on, there's like four verbs here, and the annotations are intuitive if you have the context. just because you never do your own laundry doesn't mean the rest of us don't know what's up.
they make more sense than most mobile UIs, and there's usually text with them anyway.
What about, instead of changing the symbols we add text. Or just teach them at school :) Symbols are great for brevity and aesthetics, but they have to be learned to be useful. Oh I got an idea, what about a QR code with all the info included, you just have to scan it ;)
I wonder whether using a thermometer is a good idea. Mercury thermometers are getting harder to find, which is not great for a symbol expected to last 50 years.
Then again, maybe we have another "floppy disk" situation where the concept survives the artifact.
Hot take (or cold, delicate take with color-safe bleach if you prefer): if you have to pay attention to the laundry symbols, skip it and buy something else. Find durable clothes that are acceptably fashionable and forget about the laundry headache.
A lot of these are good, but changing the wash basin to a front-loading washer is a mistake IMHO. There are plenty of people around the world who don't machine wash their clothes, and a water basin feels like the ur-washer, the platonic ideal.
the optimism of consistently printing (or stitching!) symbols with this level of detail across fabric types, from printed tags to printed on-fabric to stitched tags, that will also remain readable after frequent wear and cleaning
ignoring the existing multiplicity of existing standards (ISO vs. ASTM vs. GINETEX vs. Japan vs. OTEXA/CGSB/Canada) to propose another one, especially when many of the changes he makes were at one point implemented in a non-English-speaking nation for decades[1] and then abandoned for the international standard that he doesn't like
redesigning all future clothing to use a new standard that can be confused or conflict with existing standards that will remain in use for decades because no older non-compliant clothing will be immediately destroyed, much less all
missing more actionable user-focused solutions that don't require a new standard, such as adding standardized, well-designed, localized symbol keys on points of interaction, like laundry supplies and equipment
all leading to a point not of action but to "bring more awareness to the cost" of something the author and his immediate audience personally does not understand, but which is not necessarily broadly misunderstood
and for that matter is only believed by the author to be broadly misunderstood because of an out-of-context, entertaining blog post[2] where, for mildly career-connected fun and LinkedIn social engagement, the researcher texted her mom and some personal friends and came to a half-joking conclusion appropriate to the post's mostly unserious tone ("I am predictably going to advocate more user research on the matter") that's neither mentioned nor applied by the author
Some aspects are improved - some are not. I cannot imageine the tiny tiny numbers inside the washing machine are going to print well. But the washing machine logo in general makes more sense?
Maybe we shall replace all these tags with a chip and a laundry basket that sorts all clothes into a few piles and feeds them into a washer with the right settings.
The glass thermometer in 2022 seems a bit like using a 3.5" floppy disk as a save icon, and I don't think it would show up very well on a tiny clothing tag.
Speaking of bad design, who thought it was a good idea to blink the labels in the animation, immediately after saying half of people asked knew none of the symbols?
Also it seems like if the intent of the logos is to be easily looked up for reference, the real UX failure is in the washing machines rather than the tags. Why don't the machines just stamp a reference table by the control panel?
Agreed. I had to watch the animation cycle a dozen times to address my curiosity on what the current symbols mean. Should have been two images like below, but with the text.
Laundry symbols make no sense... So let's get rid of them!
Let's simply make all clothes compatible with a regular wash and tumble dry process.
If the clothes use a dye that isn't waterproof, use a different dye. If the fabric is too fragile to withstand spinning, use a stronger fabric. If a material can't withstand the heat of a dryer, use better material.
Material science has come so far in the past 100 years that we can meet or exceed the performance of pretty much any of last centuries materials while also being able to make the stuff washable.
detritus|3 years ago
I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supposed to be, and the numerals in the three thereafter are only legible because I'm staring at a bright screen, not swearing into the void in my laundry room, trying to find a better light.
All that aside, I feel I'd still have to look their new interpretations up. International visual vernacular .. doesn't really exist.
b112|3 years ago
Laundry is literally filled with things to know, outside of these symbols. Household tasks are.
I don't see labels on bleech bottles, saying not to mix it with vinegar or you could die. Yet people have done that in the wash, so why not start there?
Here's what each sane person should do, who actually takes time to look at tags. (after all if you couldn't care less, and never look at tags, what's the point?)
Print a copy of the extended tag list out, and hang it in the laundry room at home. I have a cabinet where I keep extra detergent, etc, so I taped it up on the inside of the door.
Problem sovled.
For a laundrymat, for your smartphone, download a properly formatted, for easy phone viewing version.
Done.
Non-problem, compared to expecting the entire planet to change. We don't need another standard!!
All that would happen is I'd have two standards to look at.
leephillips|3 years ago
Also, I missed a link to a legend for the original design, for which the author’s animated version does not compensate.
quitit|3 years ago
There isnt much point in making a competing standard as we already know what happens (more confusion, more fractured knowledge, etc.)
Instead, just print a laundry chart and leave it with the washer.
As for whitegoods manufacturers: they could, as a minimum, describe their various wash and dry settings using the appropriate symbols rather than marketing terms.
mc32|3 years ago
The water temp in the old one is expressed much more clearly than the new one.
The most significant improvement is the bleach/no bleach symbol. The rest either don't improve much or actually make things less legible.
Also, sidenote the "drying" symbol looks a bit like the hotsprings/onsen symbol --the official symbol is a little diff as it has an oval, but on roadsigns they drop the oval sometimes so it looks very similar (see U+2668)
mikeryan|3 years ago
The iconography is updated which is nice but the line weights are too thick.
carlmr|3 years ago
The flask for bleach, and the drying symbols are much clearer though.
The detail in some is a bit too high for some clothing tags, I'd agree on that.
masklinn|3 years ago
Indeed, especially given the current nonsense is commonly unreadable already after just a wash or two (if not before you've washed the garment).
llamajams|3 years ago
atx42|3 years ago
assttoasstmgr|3 years ago
Over the last 15 years or so I think we've taken a few giant steps backwards as we let freewheeling artists take over. Yet go back to the early 80s and look at the original Macintosh UI which was designed by an artist - Susan Kare - with complete elegance and simplicity. What has happened? Just because computers have increased in speed doesn't mean the complexity of the artwork must increase proportionally - often at the expense of usability.
scrame|3 years ago
secretsatan|3 years ago
novosel|3 years ago
I propose a Moore's law of a label printing density doubling every 18 months (years?).
bergenty|3 years ago
happytoexplain|3 years ago
Edit: Another advantage of high legibility is speed. Even if I have a tag where the new symbols are legible, I won't be interpreting them as quickly as the original symbols, under the precondition that I am already familiar with each set of symbols.
Edit: I think the reason this provoked me is that I have run into cases where this attitude toward design created bad real world experiences, so I immediately want to warn away from it as soon as I see it even in a hypothetical case.
Twirrim|3 years ago
1) Irons have respective dots on them. I can look at the clothes, look at the iron, and turn the temperature dial to the matching setting. I'm not playing guessing games of "where on the dial is 1/3rd?", there's a literal dot that matches the symbol.
2) The temperature symbols now go from easy to distinguish to confusing, especially when smaller and lighting not so great. Is it a 1/3 of the way through? 2/3rs? Counting dots is way, way easier and quicker.
Aeolun|3 years ago
You can reverse this too. If I never understand what they mean, it doesn’t matter that I can still read them.
I mean, I agree there’s too many hard to read details, but the originals are absolutely impenetrable.
kgermino|3 years ago
It's similar for the iron. Maybe dots as temperature isn't obvious, but it's about as clear as the thermometer, is easy to read, and matches the icons on the iron itself.
kergonath|3 years ago
It’s really not. It looks like an Erlenmeyer flask, which could contain anything (“use detergent”? “Use additives”? There are lots of things that come up in bottles in my laundry room).
I found the ones about drying to be better, probably because the original ones were way too abstract.
> If I don't know what a line under the washing machine means, how am I supposed to know what the 2nd button means.
Exactly! I don’t know what pushing the 2nd button on my washing machine does, either. Hell, my washing machine does not have anything that looks like the buttons of the symbols. And good luck trying to guess which one of the three buttons is filled after 5 washes, when the presence of one or two lines will still be clear.
mrcartmeneses|3 years ago
fhars|3 years ago
Or does that just happen on European irons?
latortuga|3 years ago
bigtones|3 years ago
Schroedingersat|3 years ago
Which is exactly in line with 'good' ui design in software. So goal achieved, I guess.
nephrite|3 years ago
jacknews|3 years ago
Eg, in some cases the redesign uses the 'dots' motif for strength of effect, and yet in others it uses a 'thermometer'. Just inconsistent, and actually even less intuitive.
AdamH12113|3 years ago
Weird fact: Despite having been around for decades, laundry symbols have not been assigned Unicode code points. This mailing list email from Ken Whistler in 2003[1] suggests the existence of a conflicting Canadian standard as a reason, along with a philosophy of not including "icons" (especially color-coded ones!) in a "character" set, given that pictographic language is likely to change over the next century.
(Unicode threw that out the window in 2010 when they standardized emojis, and given how complex emojis have become Ken's argument is sounding better and better...)
[1] http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m06/0274.html
marcosdumay|3 years ago
Take a look on those symbols: "A", "B", "C". A triangle with the basis moved up, two circles with a straight side, and an open circumference arc. They were abstract into complete meaningless, yet they are great for their use-case.
99_00|3 years ago
Do you know how to do your laundry despite not knowing how to read the symbols?
cameronh90|3 years ago
Generally, we just ignore the labels and put all the clothes in a colour separated wash on the 30c daily eco cycle. If the clothes get damaged - which is rare in a modern non-agitator washing machine - we just don't buy that type of fabric/garment any more. It does reduce the clothing options a little bit, for example, no silk, but it's worth the improved quality of life. Laundry Darwinism.
There are a few types of necessary item we do get dry cleaned, such as expensive suits and ball gowns, but at least for us those are rare use.
The other thing that has improved our life a lot is only buying non-iron clothing.
mrcartmeneses|3 years ago
The physical world is complex.
Interestingly most detergent works great at 30c. Hotter wash temps are for a time before biological enzymes were used as detergent additives.
pimlottc|3 years ago
I’m not sure that they even meets the authors own objectives — there are more small details that are harder to resolve at small sizes and likely would be harder to print clearly. They also aren’t any more “googleable” than the originals.
Lastly, they also assume that users are familiar with front loading washing machines, which may not be common in some places. It could easily be interpreted as a tumble dryer.
blowski|3 years ago
All that said, I've been ignoring the labels for years, and never had a problem.
mhandley|3 years ago
andrew_|3 years ago
hoosieree|3 years ago
moralestapia|3 years ago
Also, why not putting the old and new icons side by side? For an UX designer that is policing on others, the animated GIF that you can't control with a fast transition was a very poor choice.
mongol|3 years ago
causi|3 years ago
Frankly I think symbols that give you no impression at all are better than symbols that give you the wrong impression.
oneplane|3 years ago
crispyambulance|3 years ago
Curious about those middle temperature settings. It seems like a lot of levels: 70C, 60C, 50C, 40C. What fabric would be fine at 40C, but 50C would be "too hot"?
I mean, I understand that some synthetics or wool would have a problem with extreme heat like 95C, and some might need to be at room temp for color to stay. But beyond that, isn't one "middle level" enough?
eddyg|3 years ago
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/laundry-lens/id1513767864
kergonath|3 years ago
zcw100|3 years ago
" stroke width was increased so the overall shapes can still be read when details are lost to the viewing distance or blurred visions"
Increasing the stroke width isn't going to overcome this and the symbols have to be durable enough to still be read after the tag is worn and faded.
robonerd|3 years ago
And if you're going to have the symbols and printed text, you might as well omit the symbols entirely. I think both sets of symbols are worthless. I could probably guess what some of them mean if my life depended on it, but I'm not going to. Deciphering symbols is a waste of my time. At least if printed Spanish were used, puzzling out the meaning would actually enrich my life. The symbols are worthless noise and I don't want their meaning wasting space in my brain.
RedShift1|3 years ago
nimbius|3 years ago
Welding symbols:
https://weldingpros.net/welding-symbols/
graypegg|3 years ago
I wonder why they felt it necessary to keep everything as a single icon? Wouldn’t be as impossible to print/stitch or read if the icons were larger nouns + modifiers.
kqr|3 years ago
To remember that the circle is dry cleaning it helps to know that it can circumscribe letters indicating what type of dry cleaning process is allowed.
The tumble dry symbol just looks like a tumble dryer, and the washing symbol the same. Bleach is the tricky one but can be remembered because it's not one of the others.
Apreche|3 years ago
Swenrekcah|3 years ago
I will go and make one sheet for me now.
In fact, this is the stuff that should be part of a high-school curriculum!
itisit|3 years ago
This post reminds me of when a junior dev refactors a bit of code that they now find to be well-crafted and intelligible simply because it came from their own mind. However, the result is often just as esoteric and convoluted, or it's even worse!
masswerk|3 years ago
E.g., does this symbol mean do not pack the cleaned cloth in a nylon envelope, or does it mean no dry cleaning? Is this an artificial heat source, or "natural dry"? Or is it the smelly process (bleaching)? Is this a closed chemical or recycling process, or tumbling? Also, the dot system is probably easier to identify and discern and more resistant to wear than the depiction of thermometers (which probably only work relative to each other, having something to compare with).
Moreover, icons like these are not app icons on the home screen: they do not work best, if they (or their constituting elements) are all of even weight. Eye-sight, lighting conditions and ease of identification are primary aspects of this. Something like this should probably work by a primary context identifier, conveyed by the shape, and a secondary qualifier ("specificator") inside that shape with convenient separating whitespace around it.
jerojero|3 years ago
In fact, now that I've seen the meaning of each one of them I think I might start to recognise them better :)
xwdv|3 years ago
el-salvador|3 years ago
Most of the time I have just used the standard wash setting, then air dry if sunny or machine dry if raining.
I’m not even sure how temperature influences washing. I’ll have to read about that.
adregan|3 years ago
One must remember that these are international symbols and the cultural context you bring to interpretation is different from another’s.
Ekaros|3 years ago
superasn|3 years ago
Also as other commenters have said it will do a much worse job when the fabric is faded or somebody without a 20/20 vision.
I think somebody else needs to take a shot at this again.
pronik|3 years ago
And besides that: do we really need new icons? Make an app which will recognize and interpret the icons and you are done without making several gigantic industries replace well-known and well-working pieces of their daily work.
memorable|3 years ago
https://scribe.rip/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F...
SZJX|3 years ago
So many comments even straight out dismissing the necessity of the labels altogether, which 1. is not the point at all and 2. would definitely not be the sentiment from those who are actually in charge of the laundry and care about taking care their clothes well over the years.
Maybe HN doesn’t necessarily have the intended audience for this kind of post then.
JoeAltmaier|3 years ago
I liken these attempts at symbol sets, to ancient hieroglyphics - a different picture-writing for everything. Even the Egyptians gave up and turned to phonetic spelling.
Just write the instructions on the tag. Or heck, put a 2D scan code there and my phone will tell me what to do.
roelschroeven|3 years ago
But then you need different labels for different markets, and even then often lots of different languages on the same label. That's the whole point of using symbols instead: they are universal.
At least in theory. In the real world labels do contain instructions in multiple languages, and I do read those instead of trying to decipher the symbols.
ThinkingGuy|3 years ago
Also, while I can feel with my hand whether water is "cold," "warm," or "hot." I honestly have no idea what the actual temperature of the water in my washer is in degrees Celsius.
Furthermore, I live in the US (which is not where any of my clothes are made), so there's the added step of trying to convert the degrees from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
masklinn|3 years ago
The explicit temperatures are for machine washing, don't you just... set the washing temperature to whatever you want?
If you're washing by hand, it's unlikely that you're washing above 40C, and that's if you like hurting yourself: at 50C (120F) serious burns take about 10mn, at 60C (140F) it's around 3 seconds.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
antux|3 years ago
SkeuomorphicBee|3 years ago
The worst offender being the representation of a front loading washing machine, while most of the developing world uses top loading washing machines. In my country all those "washing machine" icons would be incorrectly read as tumble dryer icons because here washers are top loaded and dryers are front loaded.
NullPrefix|3 years ago
Solvitieg|3 years ago
bricemo|3 years ago
bowsamic|3 years ago
kergonath|3 years ago
How is embedding a representation of what a washing machine looks like now makes them more universal or recognisable?
Despite the couple of paragraphs pontificating about what good icons should be, most of them are much worse than the cleaner, simpler, older ones. The drying ones are more descriptive, but less legible.
IshKebab|3 years ago
The originals are too abstract. Unless you memorise them you basically have to look them up every time. Which is probably why most clothes also have English text telling you what to do on the label.
The new ones obviously have too small details to print on a typical label but I think that could be fixed fairly easily.
kleer001|3 years ago
Arabic numerals make no sense. Kanji makes no sense. The Roman alphabet makes no sense. Of course, they're symbols. You memorize them. They stand for the object they're pointing at. They're not abstractions meant to represent directly the thing its self.
Everyone, stop being so literal. Sheesh.
the_mitsuhiko|3 years ago
aceazzameen|3 years ago
There's some decent ideas here though. The shape of the bleach bottle, the circular motion of the arrows indicating tumble, a thermometer, and a dry cleaning bag. Unfortunately, the execution isn't as good as it should be. The strokes are too thick, and detailing is too crowded.
If anything, this is a decent first draft. But I would send it back with notes. The most important one being: less is more. And it's okay to leave existing icons alone that already work. Perhaps redesign within the constraints of the existing style, rather than creating a new style?
ibejoeb|3 years ago
If you really want people to understand, it should probably be just arabic numerals. They're almost universally understand, and then you can just look it up in your language or print out the chart and put it next to the machine.
Terry_Roll|3 years ago
Its not a hard task building a washing machine or tumble dryer that matches the washing symbols, but it seems to be for the current industry leaders!
dpratt|3 years ago
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
butz|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
amenghra|3 years ago
Ekaros|3 years ago
99_00|3 years ago
I don't seem to have problems doing laundry despite not understanding the care label.
pydry|3 years ago
penneyd|3 years ago
hulitu|3 years ago
Another failed GUI designer. If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them. Why repeat the Windows GUI experience ? I get that the first phones were slow and doing things in Java didn't help and recognizing that the GUI is crap would not help with market adoption, but let's not pretend that Material design or reinventing a GUI every two years is innovative.
phailhaus|3 years ago
The thesis is that they don't work, at all. I have to look them up every time because they are absolutely inscrutable today. Laundry symbols are rarely looked at for most folks, so they have to be maximally communicative. It's not good enough if the only people that know what they mean are those that deal with them constantly.
Melatonic|3 years ago
gorkish|3 years ago
jedberg|3 years ago
In most cases it's pretty obvious how a fabric should be washed just based on the feel of the material. In cases where it isn't, I've got the chart up in the one place I do laundry. Most launder mats I've been to have the same chart on the wall somewhere.
I'm not sure why memorizing is so bad in this case.
pantulis|3 years ago
Additionally, laundry & ironing professionals have those symbols more than memorized ;)
peanut_worm|3 years ago
AnotherGoodName|3 years ago
Dyes, machines and laundry detergent all changed for the better. I haven't inadvertently made things pink in 20 years now. The red now holds. Even new jeans come prewashed. My machine seems to be much gentler too.
O__________O|3 years ago
According to Statista, 80% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. Just add a link to the instructions and have translations in plain language that are standardized; that is manufactures/brands just reuse the standard types of instructions that are relevant.
robjan|3 years ago
malfist|3 years ago
ruined|3 years ago
they make more sense than most mobile UIs, and there's usually text with them anyway.
kukx|3 years ago
browningstreet|3 years ago
https://washerhouse.com/en/perevod-terminov/
bandyaboot|3 years ago
vr46|3 years ago
A clear number for temperature on its own, followed by a separate symbol for a machine or a hand would be clearer than piling one onto another.
probably_wrong|3 years ago
Then again, maybe we have another "floppy disk" situation where the concept survives the artifact.
ARandomerDude|3 years ago
jszymborski|3 years ago
Night_Thastus|3 years ago
trynewideas|3 years ago
ignoring the existing multiplicity of existing standards (ISO vs. ASTM vs. GINETEX vs. Japan vs. OTEXA/CGSB/Canada) to propose another one, especially when many of the changes he makes were at one point implemented in a non-English-speaking nation for decades[1] and then abandoned for the international standard that he doesn't like
redesigning all future clothing to use a new standard that can be confused or conflict with existing standards that will remain in use for decades because no older non-compliant clothing will be immediately destroyed, much less all
missing more actionable user-focused solutions that don't require a new standard, such as adding standardized, well-designed, localized symbol keys on points of interaction, like laundry supplies and equipment
all leading to a point not of action but to "bring more awareness to the cost" of something the author and his immediate audience personally does not understand, but which is not necessarily broadly misunderstood
and for that matter is only believed by the author to be broadly misunderstood because of an out-of-context, entertaining blog post[2] where, for mildly career-connected fun and LinkedIn social engagement, the researcher texted her mom and some personal friends and came to a half-joking conclusion appropriate to the post's mostly unserious tone ("I am predictably going to advocate more user research on the matter") that's neither mentioned nor applied by the author
[1] https://www.sbs-zipper.com/blog/japan-implements-new-clothin...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/speed-user-research-question-...
Melatonic|3 years ago
leokennis|3 years ago
2. Add said scheme to iOS and Android
3. Scan the QR code
4. iOS or Android show the washing instructions in text/icons/images, of course localized
zaptheimpaler|3 years ago
nsxwolf|3 years ago
smegsicle|3 years ago
i agree with this part of your premise (and also that a thermometer would be hard to read on a tiny tag)
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
ajhurliman|3 years ago
RGamma|3 years ago
zekrioca|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
aristofun|3 years ago
Pakdef|3 years ago
kingofpandora|3 years ago
robonerd|3 years ago
bluSCALE4|3 years ago
bluSCALE4|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
timeon|3 years ago
Izkata|3 years ago
naravara|3 years ago
Cd00d|3 years ago
p1mrx|3 years ago
wahnfrieden|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
londons_explore|3 years ago
Let's simply make all clothes compatible with a regular wash and tumble dry process.
If the clothes use a dye that isn't waterproof, use a different dye. If the fabric is too fragile to withstand spinning, use a stronger fabric. If a material can't withstand the heat of a dryer, use better material.
Material science has come so far in the past 100 years that we can meet or exceed the performance of pretty much any of last centuries materials while also being able to make the stuff washable.
The-Bus|3 years ago
Computers make no sense! So let's simplify them. Let's just have one kind of laptop, desktop, server, and phone. With the same operating system.
Why are we still using so many different kinds of computers?
Cd00d|3 years ago
Because the symbols need to be looked up we shouldn't use silk any more??
micromacrofoot|3 years ago
npteljes|3 years ago