Kate Kaplan hits on something over at Nielsen Norman Group’s blog that’s been bugging me:
The challenge with this icon is sparkle ambiguity: Participants in our recent research study generally agreed that it represented something a little special. But, what was that something? And why was it special? That was less obvious. We encountered widely and wildly varied interpretations.
Man, I hate those sparkles. Correction: I loathe it as an icon but I use the heck out the ✨ emoji. I may even go so far as to say that my favorite thing about Dave Rupert’s introduction to web components is that it is littered with ✨ emoji every time the word “superpower” is evoked.
(Correction for the correction: I love everything about Dave’s introduction to web components. Take the full course!)
Sparkles get closer to becoming the unofficial AI icon every time a new one makes its way into some new app’s UI — the same way some menus became hamburgers and others became kebabs.
It’s ambiguous, right? I will say that I was stoked to see Notion roll out a fresh new icon for their AI feature just this week:
A face is interesting! I find human heads less compelling, especially when they’re realistic. Same deal with robot heads, which is another theme you can spot in the wild. But a face, particularly one that’s on the whimsical side as a line drawing, looks like it could work in this context that’s specific to Notion. I imagine another company or app having a tough time pulling off the same icon because this one is so closely tied to Notion’s overall branding:
I also like how Notion has several versions of the icon for use in different situations.
And, yes, it animates as well:
I’m not saying Notion’s landed on a silver bullet. What I am saying is that they’re doing a great job transitioning from an ambiguous one to a more meaningful one, something that Kate articulates extremely well:
[S]parkles are used frequently to represent not only AI features and capabilities but also completely unrelated features and content, such as visual effects, deals or rewards, personalized ads, and new content.
I get worked up about this because I own a pessimistic and assumptive view that the proliferation of sparkles icons reeks of marketing. There’s no way for me to know this, of course, but I’ll unabashedly don my tinfoil hat for this one.
Anyway, Kate’s article is a much more thorough investigation that’s worth the deep dive — it’s a selection pulled from an entire book on the topic of successful icon design. I’ll leave you with a sobering quote:
Finally, I also predict that the icon’s association with AI-driven features will get stronger in the immediate future. So, for the time being, using it to indicate AI-driven features (or even simply new features) may be useful. Over time, as AI-driven features become more common or even expected across interfaces, there will be less of a need to call them out. It won’t matter that the features are AI-driven; it will matter only that they are present and meet user needs.