With the presentation problem for actions solved, the focus turned to how to advertise those buttons. When Twitterrific's designers considered Apple's standard Action icon (page 148), it didn't seem to match up with the app's broad range of options.
Gedeon: What is that Action icon? It's not immediately clear what it stands for. The icon suggests sending or forwarding something, but that's not what you're doing in the actions we present. Some of the actions apply to the tweet, some of them apply to the author, and there's no one type of action under there. We just didn't feel that Apple's preexisting Action icon addressed all of those different features. We considered using the "More" (...) icon, but that didn't really do or suggest anything either. So we decided to design our own. We have a whole page of things we tried for that icon, but we finally arrived at the asterisk. I don't think the asterisk is the best solution—a lot of people don't immediately know what it is— but given the alternatives, it was the least of 300 evils.
Icons are really important, and being the Iconfactory—we do icons for a living—we probably anguish over icons more than we should. It's one of those things that people take for granted when they use an app. For us, though, it was especially important that they be clear for this app, because we made the conscious decision that we weren't going to label the icons. Even if you don't figure out what they are right away, though, our thought was that you learn quickly enough that you don't need to take up that extra space with labels.
Figure 6-22. Tapping the funnel icon (left) summons Twitterrific's filter bar (right) to display only specific types of tweets. These icons get a different style and highlighting effect to distinguish the filter bar from the main toolbar. From left to right on the filter bar, tap an icon to filter by: replies and mentions, direct messages, favorites, your own tweets, or those you've marked.