Imagine a weather app which only tells you if it's raining or not, and if the temperature hot, temperate, or cold.
No percentage chance of rain, no degrees.
It's enough to get by, but you'd never have a great sense of the weather before stepping outside, or be sure if you should grab a thinner or thicker coat, a scarf or a hood. The precision of information provided restricts how much adaptability you can develop.
This is the default on most computers. Battery level, brightness, volume, microphone sensitivity, CPU/RAM usage, connection strength, etc. It's all icons instead of percentages.
And that's just the standard computer list, if you work in specialized apps there's probably more.
Icons are nice for quick binary "is it working" checks, but I I find just as often problems can be explained by exceedingly high or low amounts. For some of my devices, 10% volume is normal, 40% triggers a frantic scramble for the mute button, and the icons are identical.
I turned on WiFi strength percentages by accident, but now I can't imagine working without it. I always noticed when pages were loading slightly slowly, but this gives me a quantifiable explanation which icons obscure. I know, concretely, what 50% connection on my main WiFi network means for my workflow, and what 70% RAM does to my laptop's input speed.
You can't build that intuition off 2-3 state icons because the fidelity isn't high enough.
Turn on the percentages.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
No time for notes today.
I'm doing alright.
Tomorrow?
- Rew