How to Optimize Dashboard Icons for a Fast Visual Search

Icons are designed to help users navigate user interfaces. Nowhere are they more prevalent than on mobile dashboards.

Dashboards contain multiple icons in a compact area. This increases the user’s cognitive load for accomplishing tasks. If your grouped icons aren’t optimized for visual search, users can find it hard and slow to navigate your app.

When users are searching through a group of icons, they need to be able to recognize their target icon quickly. If you want your icons to have a fast visual search, there are a few design factors you should optimize.

Detailed Vs. Simplified Icons

The more detail on an icon, the more visual noise it has. Visual noise compounds when users view detailed icons grouped together. Searching and targeting an icon takes more time because the user is overstimulated with each icon’s internal detail of lines, shapes, and shades.

In contrast, a group of simplified icons has lower visual noise which allows users to search and target icons faster. The internal details of each icon is minimal, which makes the icon shape more distinct and quicker to recognize.

Research found that simplified icons are faster to recognize than detailed icons. However, if simplified icons are made…