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'.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Compare to the other symbols in that set: a square refers to the drying process, with the contents being how to dry it. A circle instead of a square means no drying process, so it shouldn't get wet in the first place - hence dry-cleaning.
At least that's how I see it, it could also just have been the last obvious symbol remaining after square/triangle were taken.
Then you'd just have a drop, but true, there are three states - dry clean ok, dry clean bad, dry clean mandatory (where the first is do either, but that could be indicated with no symbol at all).
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.
I don't follow your single dots argument? There's no right or left, one dot = low? Plus, as the OP says, irons use the exact same dot count, so nothing else is needed.
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.
No that happens here (US) too. That’s what I was referring to when I said it “matches the icons on the iron itself” but it’s not a very clear sentence.
My iron does not have a temperature dial (it has digital controls) and none of the settings have any dots or anything that resembles the tag icons in any way.
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 washing machines in my building have the buttons in a 2x2 grid (the 4th being a "small load" toggle for reduced water usage), so it has no relation to anything here either.
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.
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
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 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.
Ok, just to clarify, do people say "bleach" when the mean products containing sodium percarbonate (like Vanish, OxiClean)? Or do you mean actual bleach (as in sodium hypochlorite)?
Actual bleach. I typically use oxi-clean, very rarely use bleach. I've found that even the most severe staining/yellowing can be removed by soaking the clothes in the washer overnight with oxi-clean (something that's not really possible with front loader machines).
Well, I mostly use things like Vanish/OxiClean, but there are times when I hit proper bleach - but admittedly that one is rare enough (especially since switching to coloured bedsheets) that I do not keep bottle of sodium hypochlorite on hand.
I use it all the time. In fact I was staying at an airbnb recently and my hair dye stained all his towels and pillow cases (a week after I got it done!) so I gave them a good bleaching before I left and left them sparkling white.
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.
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)
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.
Way too thick, overlapping and thats why probably impossible to print on most textile labal printers. I also find most of the labels looking the same - similar to when Google redesigned their icons and not everyone liked it.
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.
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)
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.
The tags aren't that hard to remember, either. Do not bleach is the only one that you have to think, oh right the triangle is a bottle of bleach. The circle in a square is describing spin cycle. The circle with no square is describing drying without heat. The iron is describing an iron. The dots always represent the three levels of heat, just like on your iron.
I remember this in spite of not having done laundry in 5 years. And you're exactly right. New symbols mean little to me, I would still need to look them up and then there would be twice as many bad symbols.
This redesign article is an example of why you should avoid UI/UX people who can only design. They'll change your branding everytime they get bored and create more headache than they solve.
It's not "only three levels". All my irons have had "continuous" "level" knob, with three "presets", represented as dots. Along with other "presets" for different kinds of things to iron. But maybe that's Euro thing.
Funny thing, those two do not match. For example, on my current iron "Cotton" is marked at three-dots, whereas all my cotton clothes have labels that insist on ironing them on two-dots.
In what language(s)? Then you run out of room on the packaging/waste paper. The point of symbols is that they can tell more information in a smaller space and can be recognized universally.
Maybe you gotta look them up on your own, but after a while, you learn the ones you need to.
Bleach and vinegar are both acidic, it's acids and bases (like ammonia. Main ingredient in Windex) that should not be mixed due to the potentially toxic gases they will produce.
Well, I can’t speak to your tolerance for chlorine gas, but…
Or were you saying that the bleach bottles on your shelf state that one should not mix bleach with acids such as vinegar? I’d actually have to go look at mine, but I don’t recall a mention.
So I looked: the warning is in the middle of a wall of text, with print so small only pedantic geeks with good, young eyes are going to bother. Let alone be able to read it, anyone over 40 will need a magnifier.
I was referring to the statement that the bottles don't contain a warning, not about the chemical reaction that obviously exists.
It probably doesn't specify vinegar, but a general "do not mix with other cleaners". If it only said vinegar, then someone would mix it with ammonia and when they died, they'd claim "it only said vinegar!"
It probably doesn't specify vinegar, but a general "do not mix with other cleaners"
Without going back and straining my eyes, I don't think it even goes that far. Just do not mix with acids, and it specifically called out "urine and feces", from which I guess we're supposed to surmise that it is not a toilet cleaner? It's a difficult problem, yes, because "but it didn't say not to..."
But again, I'm pretty sure the solution does not lie in a wall of 6 pt. text., regardless of what it needs to say.
> I really find the idea that "having to know, or lookup stuff", as a problem, offensive.
I tend to agree. As a culture we have the knowledge of the world in our pocket day in and day out yet we have become lazy and even obstinate about using it.
I've started turning gardening and landscaping into a bit of a hobby with my new house. I'm constantly looking up specifics on plants, how to prune, and etc. It is so much easier than when I last had a house. The workflow no longer requires amassed knowledge, books, or keeping every tag that came with every plant.
It's now:
Take a photo of plant
Use app to identify
Get all the info you need
> I tend to agree. As a culture we have the knowledge of the world in our pocket day in and day out yet we have become lazy and even obstinate about using it.
What do you think the problem (one of them) with the Information Age is? The affordance of lookup makes it so that we have to look up more and more. And then we have to arrange more and more information in order to make the frequently-needed information convenient enough to look up.
I think it's very generational. I'm Gen-X but I cut my teeth on BBS's and IRC. I've been connected and looked forward to being more connected since the early 90's.
Part of my generation and most of the previous generations IMO have never fully embraced a connected world. Just watching how much quarantine crushed some people and how some of us doubled down on online lives that were already fulfilling (discord, watch parties and online interaction). I've always felt judged by my older friends / folks my age about how I live my life. (I met my wife in an MMO a decade ago and we moved across the country to be together.)
When forced to go online, the generation that rejected online have an allergic reaction. I can't even count the number of times I have been texted or called for something personally or professionally that could be found in a 5 minute search by people who reject the idea of even searching first.
Long story short, I think it will literally die out.
I would highly recommend reading some UX classics such as:
- The Inmate Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
(and I'm sure there are many more good resources that are recent than that.)
It's very easy as tech-savvy people like us to underestimate how hard technology, even conventions like laundry symbols, are. I personally have printed out a legend explaining the laundry symbols and put them near to my washing machine, but I'm the only person I know who does that. Everyone else guesses or struggles to use laundry symbols correctly, or reads the text in English if it is provided.
Now, does that mean we should change all the laundry symbols just because one person shared a redesign on their blog? No. Changing something that is so well-established has significant downsides and risks. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to spot their difficulties, and to pursue better UX relentlessly, with testing with real users. That's what separates a good (UX) designer from an engineer who produces something that fits their mindset but not the mindset of actual users.
They aren't well known, but they're an international standard. Getting everyone to switch to a new system will take a huge effort. As others said above, there are just so many symbols that I dare to claim it is impossible to come up with a symbol set that is self explanatory, or easy to memorize. As soon as you're in doubt about any symbol, you'd have to look it up, and then it doesn't matter whether you need to look up one or three.
I only know the one for temperature, the "no dryer" one, "wash by hand" and "no spin-dry". But like you, I don't give a shit. I wash everything at 60 (underwear, bed sheets, towels) or 40 (everything else) °C with spin-dry at 1400rpm.[*] Some pieces might wear faster, but so be it. I guess the vast majority of people does it that way.
[*] Ok ok, except wool or cashmere, or a suit. But this is something I just learned from my mom at young age, not by researching any symbols.
There are warnings on my bleach bottles saying not to mix with things. But that didn't stop my wife from doing it once. Generally people don't RTFM even if you put it on the bottle in big red letters.
edit: Just to be clear, though, I agree with you - people should educate themselves and the fact that people won't make a point of educating themselves is the problem. I've had multiple experiences where I paused to look up if it was safe to mix medications that were being given to my kids, or if it was safe to use a human first aid ointment on a pet. Sometimes the answer is 'No!' but the general reaction is usually "Oh I wouldn't worry about it".
Are people seeing some huge benefits from paying attention to these symbols? I've been, as the kids say, "adulting" for some time, and pay no attention to them. I couldn't draw a single one from memory. If you showed me one, I'd only be able to guess at the meaning. All I do is not wash stuff that says "dry clean only" (it always just says it in text, I have no idea if there even is a symbol for that) and favor cooler water & cooler dry cycles. I air-dry anything wool (if it's not in the "dry clean only" category).
Color-safe detergents have been the norm since my very early adulthood. I remember ads for it when I was a kid but by the time I was buying detergent, most detergent was color safe. I've never even bothered to sort by color, aside from keeping raw denim away from everything else (on the rare occasions it's washed at all).
What am I missing out on? My family's clothes seem to last just fine. My wife pays even less attention to this stuff than I do, and everything seems OK.
This has been one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons for a while: https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-12-27 It's been my wife & I's philosophy on clothes for a while and it's been working out. I'm sure it's suboptimal and I'm sure I don't care.
And yes, I do pay attention (to the special cases). T-shirt? It's a t-shirt.
Winter coat? Fancy suit? See what it says. Or send it to be professionally cleaned.
Where it usually fails (with everyday stuff) is that people DNGAF and dry their clothes at 90C then come to heavily shrunk garments. Or with faded colors.
Many clothes are not supposed to be put through the dryer. Just dry them naturally unless it perennially rains where you live. I’ve stopped doing that since a long time ago and they now last much longer.
I was just having this discussion with my wife. I was under the impression that using the dryer to dry clothes is what causes items to shrink. Does the water temperature in the wash make a difference too if you hang dry?
Let's say that you have a set of symbols and 30% of the people who view them are able to derive their meaning without research. Why not try to increase that number? What's the downsides excluding the time making the new symbols.
Not if the symbols are intuitive. Remember I'm saying that in a population you are increasing the percentage that can derive the meaning of the symbols without research. That includes those that already knew the previous symbols, so it doesn't matter
30% to 50% regardless of who was what type in the past set. It's like if you changed the floppy disk icon in MS Word to a text box that read "SAVE".
Right, which means people who don’t speak English would be at a disadvantage even if they recognize the universal “save” icon that’s been used for 30 years.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds overly negative and exaggerated. Adding quotation marks around the expert seems excessive, as this is surely the author’s profession no matter you agree with his idea or not. If you compare design nowadays and say the geocity days it’s a huge leap. And for every Macintosh UI there were most likely countless unintelligible designs that nobody remembers 40 years later.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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
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.
My US market washing machine has settings for "hot", "warm", and "cold", but if there's a way to set temperature to a number, it is not intuitive and I am not aware of it (it may exist this is a 'digital' machine!). If it did have a way to set a wash temp to an arbitrary number, it would presumably be in F not C!
I think this is typical for US washing machines?
Do (eg) European washing machines instead typically have you set wash temp to an arbitrary number of °C?
Interesting! I don't believe that's how USA washing machines work, they usually just say "hot", "warm", and "cold".
Apparently USAians are washing machine philistines who don't need more than three temperatures and don't know what they are?
Anyway, this shows another challenge in these icons, the international diversity of washing techniques and technology.
(Edit: I found one possible answer online -- Euro washing machines may actually have water heaters built in, while American washing macchines may just use the existing house "hot water supply". So Euro machines can heat to desired temp, while American ones just have to take what they get! Why THAT was done that way, I don't know, difference in hot water heating technology choices? Euro houses don't usually have a central "hot water tank" like US has? Why THAT is would be yet another question...).
It's the same in europe. I know semi-professional or professional dishwashers are sometimes connected to both hot and cold inputs, not sure whether that is the case for washing machines though I wouldn't be shocked.
I suspect washers with heaters come from places that original had cold water only.
The reality is we are overthinking it - "cold/warm/hot" is about all we need, and "warm" is really just "fill as fast as possible" often, since it opens both hoses.
Shocking as it will be to you -- I'm just realizing that this differs between US and rest of world -- a home washing machine in the US can only go as hot as what comes out of the faucets. It cannot wash at 90C water, and likely can't even do 60C water. It can only do as hot as the "hot" tap water, which depends on what the hot water heat is set at, which is usually somewhere between 120F (49C) and 140F (60C).
> Do people really boil clothes? Obviously that's not a thing in the US, but I could see it being useful for whites, perhaps.
It's usually for really sturdy whites you want to disinfect after they've been soiled for instance. Use of that program has definitely gone way down over time. The energy requirements alone make it not a routine wash thing.
It's also used to basically deep clean the washing machine itself.
> I found one possible answer online -- Euro washing machines may actually have water heaters built in, while American washing macchines may just use the existing house "hot water supply". So Euro machines can heat to desired temp, while American ones just have to take what they get!
Ah so it’s the same deal as the dishwashers, I should have figured.
> Euro houses don't usually have a central "hot water tank" like US has? Why THAT is would be yet another question...).
Commonly not, although it does absolutely exist water is frequently heated up on-demand.
However a better reason might be the same as the kettle thing: the US being on 120V, so getting hot water out the furnace or hot water tank is waaay faster than heating it up on the spot.
> might be the same as the kettle thing: the US being on 120V,
I think you could be right about washing machines/dishwashers, but as far as electric kettles... even at US 120V, an electric kettle is WAY faster at heating water to boiling than even my fairly powerful (bigger than traditional burner) gas range. (Not to mention much more energy-efficient).
I have no idea why electric kettles aren't more popular in the US.
But I never thought about the 110V/230V thing with regard to kettles. I guess even though electric kettles in the US are faster than the stovetop, they still aren't as fast as everywhere else with 230V? Maybe "faster but not faster enough" is why people still heat water on a stovetop here? I don't know!
Most people that I know who make tea make it by heating water on the stovetop, and don't realize or don't care how much better an electric kettle could be; but of course you're right that coffee is much more popular than tea here, and perhaps that's why electric kettles aren't more well-known as superior for heating water.
I do not think it's because of 110V though! Even a 110V electric kettle is far faster than stovetop.
His main conclusion: Americans have less use for kettles since they don't drink tea (as much).
He also observes that electric kettles turn out to be faster and more efficient than other means of heating water for other purposes that are not obvious at first sight, as you also mention.
Not all European electric kettles are faster than American ones BTW. Mine is 1200 W (I think) which is in the range of what American ones can deliver. There are more powerful models available too of course.
Driers, and similar high power appliances, don't use a single 120V phase. They use two phrases, 180 degrees apart in normal residential houses and 120 degrees apart in apartment buildings. Any American clothing dryer I've ever seen has 240V (slightly less in apartment buildings.)
My apartment's washing machines don't even have hot/warm/cold. It has "bright colors", "colors", and "whites", which _hopefully_ correspond to three different temperatures, and then things like "delicates" where the temperature is a surprise (I hope it's cold?).
> My US market washing machine has settings for "hot", "warm", and "cold"
What the hell? That’s barbaric.
> Do (eg) European washing machines instead typically have you set wash temp to an arbitrary number of °C?
Not arbitrary except possibly on high-end machines but even entry-level stuff have temp settings for the usual stuff: cold (whatever’s out the tap), 30, 40, 60, 90.
How do you ever decide whether a load of laundry needs 30 or 40? Do you sum up all the laundry labels on each item of clothing then take the average?
Personally, I leave my machine set to hot for everything. Hot water is what I use for washing in my dish washer, in my sink, in my shower.. hot water is for washing. That's how I see it.
> How do you ever decide whether a load of laundry needs 30 or 40? Do you sum up all the laundry labels on each item of clothing then take the average?
If you have enough laundry I expect you try to put stuff with similar requirements together in the same way you segregate whites and colors.
Though usually unless your laundry is quite dirty you'd go with 30 standard and shove everything in there, at 30 color shouldn't even be too much of a factor.
In all honesty I'm not quite sure why both are present, I think it's because older generations believed 30 would not be enough (as it's "human range" water), so 30 or cold would only be for the clothes which can't go any higher and 40 was the baseline.
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.
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 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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadthey make more sense than most mobile UIs, and there's usually text with them anyway.
The 70/60 degree temp icons both say 70 in the text below. :D
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.
At least that's how I see it, it could also just have been the last obvious symbol remaining after square/triangle were taken.
(I do think the circle is difficult, but that's probably because I don't typically wear clothes that one would think about dry cleaning)
Or does that just happen on European irons?
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.
Which is exactly in line with 'good' ui design in software. So goal achieved, I guess.
" 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.
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.
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.
The iconography is updated which is nice but the line weights are too thick.
Way too thick, overlapping and thats why probably impossible to print on most textile labal printers. I also find most of the labels looking the same - similar to when Google redesigned their icons and not everyone liked it.
https://9to5google.com/2020/10/06/gmail-logo-workspace-redes...
Indeed, especially given the current nonsense is commonly unreadable already after just a wash or two (if not before you've washed the garment).
Also, I missed a link to a legend for the original design, for which the author’s animated version does not compensate.
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)
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 remember this in spite of not having done laundry in 5 years. And you're exactly right. New symbols mean little to me, I would still need to look them up and then there would be twice as many bad symbols.
This redesign article is an example of why you should avoid UI/UX people who can only design. They'll change your branding everytime they get bored and create more headache than they solve.
That's the square with no circle, the circle with no square is very different.
Just to highlight how non-universal these symbol are, I have never had an iron that has three levels of heat or that represents the levels with dots.
Funny thing, those two do not match. For example, on my current iron "Cotton" is marked at three-dots, whereas all my cotton clothes have labels that insist on ironing them on two-dots.
Maybe you gotta look them up on your own, but after a while, you learn the ones you need to.
(Chlorine) bleach mixed with ammonia (which is a base) or any acid, including vinegar, will release the chemical weapon chlorine gas.
You sure about that?
Or were you saying that the bleach bottles on your shelf state that one should not mix bleach with acids such as vinegar? I’d actually have to go look at mine, but I don’t recall a mention.
So I looked: the warning is in the middle of a wall of text, with print so small only pedantic geeks with good, young eyes are going to bother. Let alone be able to read it, anyone over 40 will need a magnifier.
It probably doesn't specify vinegar, but a general "do not mix with other cleaners". If it only said vinegar, then someone would mix it with ammonia and when they died, they'd claim "it only said vinegar!"
Without going back and straining my eyes, I don't think it even goes that far. Just do not mix with acids, and it specifically called out "urine and feces", from which I guess we're supposed to surmise that it is not a toilet cleaner? It's a difficult problem, yes, because "but it didn't say not to..."
But again, I'm pretty sure the solution does not lie in a wall of 6 pt. text., regardless of what it needs to say.
I tend to agree. As a culture we have the knowledge of the world in our pocket day in and day out yet we have become lazy and even obstinate about using it.
I've started turning gardening and landscaping into a bit of a hobby with my new house. I'm constantly looking up specifics on plants, how to prune, and etc. It is so much easier than when I last had a house. The workflow no longer requires amassed knowledge, books, or keeping every tag that came with every plant.
It's now:
Take a photo of plant Use app to identify Get all the info you need
What do you think the problem (one of them) with the Information Age is? The affordance of lookup makes it so that we have to look up more and more. And then we have to arrange more and more information in order to make the frequently-needed information convenient enough to look up.
Part of my generation and most of the previous generations IMO have never fully embraced a connected world. Just watching how much quarantine crushed some people and how some of us doubled down on online lives that were already fulfilling (discord, watch parties and online interaction). I've always felt judged by my older friends / folks my age about how I live my life. (I met my wife in an MMO a decade ago and we moved across the country to be together.)
When forced to go online, the generation that rejected online have an allergic reaction. I can't even count the number of times I have been texted or called for something personally or professionally that could be found in a 5 minute search by people who reject the idea of even searching first.
Long story short, I think it will literally die out.
The problem is ultimately that the symbols are so abstract that nobody remembers them.
- The Inmate Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
(and I'm sure there are many more good resources that are recent than that.)
It's very easy as tech-savvy people like us to underestimate how hard technology, even conventions like laundry symbols, are. I personally have printed out a legend explaining the laundry symbols and put them near to my washing machine, but I'm the only person I know who does that. Everyone else guesses or struggles to use laundry symbols correctly, or reads the text in English if it is provided.
Now, does that mean we should change all the laundry symbols just because one person shared a redesign on their blog? No. Changing something that is so well-established has significant downsides and risks. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to spot their difficulties, and to pursue better UX relentlessly, with testing with real users. That's what separates a good (UX) designer from an engineer who produces something that fits their mindset but not the mindset of actual users.
I myself recognize that I've seen a few of them, but since they are as cryptic as Egyptian hieroglyphs to me, I ignore them.
I only know the one for temperature, the "no dryer" one, "wash by hand" and "no spin-dry". But like you, I don't give a shit. I wash everything at 60 (underwear, bed sheets, towels) or 40 (everything else) °C with spin-dry at 1400rpm.[*] Some pieces might wear faster, but so be it. I guess the vast majority of people does it that way.
[*] Ok ok, except wool or cashmere, or a suit. But this is something I just learned from my mom at young age, not by researching any symbols.
edit: Just to be clear, though, I agree with you - people should educate themselves and the fact that people won't make a point of educating themselves is the problem. I've had multiple experiences where I paused to look up if it was safe to mix medications that were being given to my kids, or if it was safe to use a human first aid ointment on a pet. Sometimes the answer is 'No!' but the general reaction is usually "Oh I wouldn't worry about it".
Color-safe detergents have been the norm since my very early adulthood. I remember ads for it when I was a kid but by the time I was buying detergent, most detergent was color safe. I've never even bothered to sort by color, aside from keeping raw denim away from everything else (on the rare occasions it's washed at all).
What am I missing out on? My family's clothes seem to last just fine. My wife pays even less attention to this stuff than I do, and everything seems OK.
And yes, I do pay attention (to the special cases). T-shirt? It's a t-shirt.
Winter coat? Fancy suit? See what it says. Or send it to be professionally cleaned.
Where it usually fails (with everyday stuff) is that people DNGAF and dry their clothes at 90C then come to heavily shrunk garments. Or with faded colors.
- Dry clean formal clothes
- Air dry wool
- If I'm going through a raw denim phase, keep it out of the regular laundry
- Everything else goes in the washer set on permanent press and then in the dryer at medium heat
Never in 17 years of doing my own laundry has this system failed me in any way.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/household-hi...
Wash on cold and hang dry is best if possible.
Have you looked? Mine says “STRONG OXIDIZING AGENT: Mix only with water. Mixing this product with chemicals […] may release hazardous gases”
30% to 50% regardless of who was what type in the past set. It's like if you changed the floppy disk icon in MS Word to a text box that read "SAVE".
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.
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 propose a Moore's law of a label printing density doubling every 18 months (years?).
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.
All that said, I've been ignoring the labels for years, and never had a problem.
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 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.
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.
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.
If it doesn't go into Normal Cold Wash / Low heat tumble dry, it has no place in our household - life is too short! :)
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 agree with this part of your premise (and also that a thermometer would be hard to read on a tiny tag)
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!
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!
In fact, now that I've seen the meaning of each one of them I think I might start to recognise them better :)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/laundry-lens/id1513767864
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.
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.
I think this is typical for US washing machines?
Do (eg) European washing machines instead typically have you set wash temp to an arbitrary number of °C?
Apparently USAians are washing machine philistines who don't need more than three temperatures and don't know what they are?
Anyway, this shows another challenge in these icons, the international diversity of washing techniques and technology.
(Edit: I found one possible answer online -- Euro washing machines may actually have water heaters built in, while American washing macchines may just use the existing house "hot water supply". So Euro machines can heat to desired temp, while American ones just have to take what they get! Why THAT was done that way, I don't know, difference in hot water heating technology choices? Euro houses don't usually have a central "hot water tank" like US has? Why THAT is would be yet another question...).
The reality is we are overthinking it - "cold/warm/hot" is about all we need, and "warm" is really just "fill as fast as possible" often, since it opens both hoses.
If I wanted to bother I could run the "raw" hot water to the washer to get 140° IIRC.
It's usually for really sturdy whites you want to disinfect after they've been soiled for instance. Use of that program has definitely gone way down over time. The energy requirements alone make it not a routine wash thing.
It's also used to basically deep clean the washing machine itself.
https://unimac.com/products/washer-extractors/high-performan...
Ah so it’s the same deal as the dishwashers, I should have figured.
> Euro houses don't usually have a central "hot water tank" like US has? Why THAT is would be yet another question...).
Commonly not, although it does absolutely exist water is frequently heated up on-demand.
However a better reason might be the same as the kettle thing: the US being on 120V, so getting hot water out the furnace or hot water tank is waaay faster than heating it up on the spot.
I think you could be right about washing machines/dishwashers, but as far as electric kettles... even at US 120V, an electric kettle is WAY faster at heating water to boiling than even my fairly powerful (bigger than traditional burner) gas range. (Not to mention much more energy-efficient).
I have no idea why electric kettles aren't more popular in the US.
But I never thought about the 110V/230V thing with regard to kettles. I guess even though electric kettles in the US are faster than the stovetop, they still aren't as fast as everywhere else with 230V? Maybe "faster but not faster enough" is why people still heat water on a stovetop here? I don't know!
I do not think it's because of 110V though! Even a 110V electric kettle is far faster than stovetop.
His main conclusion: Americans have less use for kettles since they don't drink tea (as much).
He also observes that electric kettles turn out to be faster and more efficient than other means of heating water for other purposes that are not obvious at first sight, as you also mention.
Not all European electric kettles are faster than American ones BTW. Mine is 1200 W (I think) which is in the range of what American ones can deliver. There are more powerful models available too of course.
Driers, and similar high power appliances, don't use a single 120V phase. They use two phrases, 180 degrees apart in normal residential houses and 120 degrees apart in apartment buildings. Any American clothing dryer I've ever seen has 240V (slightly less in apartment buildings.)
What the hell? That’s barbaric.
> Do (eg) European washing machines instead typically have you set wash temp to an arbitrary number of °C?
Not arbitrary except possibly on high-end machines but even entry-level stuff have temp settings for the usual stuff: cold (whatever’s out the tap), 30, 40, 60, 90.
Personally, I leave my machine set to hot for everything. Hot water is what I use for washing in my dish washer, in my sink, in my shower.. hot water is for washing. That's how I see it.
If you have enough laundry I expect you try to put stuff with similar requirements together in the same way you segregate whites and colors.
Though usually unless your laundry is quite dirty you'd go with 30 standard and shove everything in there, at 30 color shouldn't even be too much of a factor.
In all honesty I'm not quite sure why both are present, I think it's because older generations believed 30 would not be enough (as it's "human range" water), so 30 or cold would only be for the clothes which can't go any higher and 40 was the baseline.
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.
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!
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.
Because the symbols need to be looked up we shouldn't use silk any more??
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?