I’m super curious if neurotypical brains process emoji’s and icons much differently than my brain (dyslexia/ADHD/and more… ). There’s really nothing to “solve” here, but I’m curious how people see things and think.
People seem to push back a LOT about the use of emojis in script and table names. Emojis are inconsistently implemented in Filemaker and I've run into a couple of problems around SQL calls so I understand the hesitation on that front, but as I’ve used more and more over the past 3 years it’s been pretty smooth, and is so much clearer for my brain to process.
I’m curious if other people find the emoji’s in the TOCs below more scannable and easier to find things than plain text, or if they’re only helpful because of my broken brain? If feels like one of those things that everyone would want to embrace… but so far the feedback I’ve gotten has been the opposite.
I think you are super-charging your own environment, so that’s a big plus. And the research backs you too. Way back when Apple did usability research they discovered that for usability, icons and labels where much more usable than either icons alone, or labels alone.
I don’t think I process them very differently from you, but I focus mainly on using emoji’s and icons (with labels) throughout my UI, given some of the challenges you list. One of the best things to happen to my interface development has been a subscription to the Noun Project. A picture really can be worth a thousand words.
Ah but be careful as images are culture-sensitive. A red cross means hospital or medical emergency… until you go to an Arabic country. An owl means wisdom… until you go to South-America. To make matters more interesting, meaning also changes over time. Not so important when images are changed regularly, as is often the case in UIs. Problematic for code as code changes is often discouraged in many contexts.
Good thoughts, but not relevant in this case. Student is student. Text bubble or meetings with students, black plus is imports, books are course catalog, graduation cap is graduation planning, gear is settings, globe for globals, calendar for attendance, etc.
All the schools I work with are in the US, so I don’t see those changing in terms of cultural significance any time soon… but definitely good to keep in mind for international development.
I like emojis for readability, but I’m hesitant to use them in actual schema. It may work, but it just feels wrong. And I worry about what may happen if you need to pass that to something outside of FM. So I stick to using them in comments and sticky notes in the graph.
I think one can live a perfectly normal/happy life as a FM dev using emojis in names, haha.
For that reason, I’m not vehemently opposed to it. I think it might make the system a little harder to work in for others, depending on how it impacts things like autocomplete (it’s not as easy for me to “type” an emoji).
And there are certainly considerations about external services calling your scripts (e.g. via Data API or OData) etc, but I think most of that can be worked around on an as-needed basis. If most of the logic happens within the happy walled garden of FM, then it’s probably not doing any harm, and maybe, certainly in your case, it’s doing a lot of good.
I totally agree with @Malcolm too that icons and labels work best for my brain too, in terms of quickly orienting myself.
Actually I kind of agree with everyone here.
My personal practices have their own flaws (though I don’t use emojis like this) that I have to work around as needed too. It’s impossible to predict every future need, so I vote “do what sparks joy”
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