This is just rage bait or comment bait. Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text, and an icon is worth a thousand words. Also results in less cognitive fatigue.
They did say that "an icon is worth a thousand words" and that "people barely read text". Why is it helpful if you still need to read text? I understand that some icons are instantly recognizable, but these are really small and the black & white shapes look rather similar.
> ... Anyone who designs UI for the real world already knows people barely read text ...
Then they are wrong. And are bad UI designers following folklore instead of sound ergonomy.
I absolutely hate icons, and parsing and remembering them causes great cognitive load on me. Also, icons like to change with each revision of the apps, with styles etc., and are not uniform across apps. This makes them completely useless to me. Maybe I can cope with an '[X]' to close a window, but that's about it. Even very common functions like 'Save' or 'Add' usually have completely arbitrary and confusing icons. 'Add' is not a long text. It works. I need text. Without any icons. I want to switch icons off so that the text can have maximum space to be reasonably large to be seen and read easily.
People are different is what UI designers should know instead.
