Icons

[davidhunter08]

Use the issue to discuss icons used in the NHS App.

Related to

NHS design system icons
NHS design system icons discussion

[Tosin-Balogun]

Native iconography

What

In the current version of the NHS mobile app, we use custom icons which are 'delicate' but also difficult to sustain. These custom icons (used in tab bar) were included in the migration to Android and iOS so that the app may continue resembling what it did in the previous Xamarin version.

We think that moving towards using system icons provided by the platform owners will improve things on the UI and our workflow

Why

An issue that currently exists with the icons is that our notification badges do not show a count because the red dots are also custom made. I suspect this might be the reason why they are just red without any number (see screenshot below). The number helps users know how many messages needs their attention.

Another issue is maintenance of our library. Our resources are limited and for us to use iconography, we would need to always create them custom which requires a bit of effort to do.

Users have high familiarity with them as they encounter them across the native device (iOS/Android)

Idea

Our idea is to use native icons, so that we can:

• explore the potential benefits for the use of a native icon library in the app and consider issues as the one mentioned prior (messages app badge count) that a native iconography library may solve.

• document the move to native icons, making clear the change of the various custom icons currently in use to their native counterpart from the Google/Apple libraries

• leverage user mental models. Google and Apple provide out of the box icons that are robust, easy to use, and familiar to a typical user, encountering them frequently in their device across other apps (when they start the phone, read push notifications, use their text messages, address book).

• access a large swath of options, which we can tweak and it saves us a lot of money in labour hours. For us to recreate the options provided by them would probably cost us an estimate of a full labour year or more.

Reference

Google material icon library
Apple's SF symbol icon library

Related to

#53 & #21