Common Icons to Indicate Further Action
For the longest time, we have been using ellipses to indicate further action in textual buttons.
This pattern has several fundamental flaws which cannot be addressed without major compromises:
- It cannot be used in symbolic buttons, heavily limiting its usefulness.
- The pattern is not very intuitive by itself, it relies on preexisting knowledge on the user's part.
- Tying into this, it is much less widely used today, mobile OS' and websites use ellipses very conservatively if at all.
- It has a tendency to break layouts. Unless the text is start-aligned, which is rarely the case with buttons, the ellipsis' light weight makes the label form a █████▂ layout instead of a balanced █████.
- I'm not sure how big of a concern this is, since most written languages follow the same punctuation rules, but I would be surprised if there weren't at least a dozen which just don't use ellipses.
- It is not very informative, "further action" can mean anything between a confirmation dialog and a complicated setup view.
Ellipses in the way we currently employ them don't have any actual linguistic value. They basically act only as icons. What prevents us from just using those?
We can easily divide "further action" into a few common patterns. Adding items, printing, choosing a file/location, authentication, confirmation (and some less common ones). Associating each of these with their own icon could fix most of the aforementioned issues.
This would also help with glanceability and an intuitive understanding of the pattern. The user would hopefully start associating each icon with the corresponding action subconsciously.
For simple confirmation, the ellipses can probably be retained, but there are other patterns we could also adopt.