Iconography Research Study

🧢 Role: Visual Designer, Researcher

🧠 Demonstrated Skills: User Research (Card Sort, Survey, Ranking, Validation), Branding, Illustration, Stakeholder management

⏳ Duration: 2 weeks

Overview

As a part of Zebra Workcloud Task Management’s modernization efforts, I redesigned a set of icons that would help users better identify the various platforms within the suite. This initiative introduced a new set of icons that are identifiable, distinguishable, and modern for a suite of products.

My Contributions

I designed new icons in conjunction with collecting old iterations of the product solutions’ icons. I then developed a series of questions to test, validate, and narrow down our icon set. After analyzing the results, I consolidated our findings and reported back to stakeholders in order to get buy-in.

Business Outcomes

• Reduced customer customization requests saving engineering resources

• Aligned branding, product, and training teams on unified product identity

• Established pattern and guideline for navigational iconography across product suite

Problem

Inconsistencies and misalignment

Zebra Workcloud Task Management is a suite of enterprise level applications that customers can purchase on a per module basis.

Several of these applications have a desktop module and a corresponding mobile client - however, the icons used to navigate between platforms were inconsistent across modalities. In the example below,

My Work is identified as checklist in Mobile while a briefcase is used in Desktop.

We found that several customers opted for custom icons - whether it was because they wanted to rename and white-label the application altogether or because they needed the icon to fit their organizations branding scheme. While A-list customers still have the opportunity to white-label their applications, we wanted to create a system that would reduce the number of requests as it still costed Zebra development resources to build and maintain.

Designing the study

We designed 3 tests to determine a new icon set based on 3 major criteria points: Likeability, Recognition, and Distinguishability.

In order to reduce bias in the studies, we constantly adjusted the order of questions and icon order within the question. we also ensured to diversify our participant pool by region, gender, age, occupation, and other major factors.

Likeability - Survey & Ranked Order Testing

We asked participants a series of questions to rank their preferred (meaning modern & friendly) icons in relation to the various features.
Afterwards, when asking participants to rank icon sets in terms of modern & friendly, participants opted for C

C received comments for looking modern, interesting/unique, fun.
C got most positive impressions.
Positive comments also often reflected that people prefer clear “differentiation” (no 2 icons looking similar)
Those who opted for B commented on legibility and ease of understanding

Recognition - Card Sort

We created a card sort test to identify how testers perceived the various icons. From the results, we were able to distinguish which items should not be used and what icons to place in our final set.

C received comments for looking modern, interesting/unique, fun.
C got most positive impressions.
Positive comments also often reflected that people prefer clear “differentiation” (no 2 icons looking similar)
Those who opted for B commented on legibility and ease of understanding

Distinguishability - Survey

Throughout the various studies, we also found that test participants were often confusing the following icons and their meanings.

After the card sort, we asked test participants which set they favored the most and 73% of participants opted for “A,” citing that they were easy to distinguish, had more variety, and felt cleaner, simpler, and modern.

As we migrate platform users off of archaic paper-processes, we have the opportunity to distinguish our product offerings by leaning into what it means to digitize work for the modern store.

We’ve graduated from paper.

Validating our Findings

After putting together the results, we wanted to test the performance of the new set altogether. We launched another card sort activity (45 participants) to validate whether users could match singular icons and their feature names.This next set of questions helped further refine the icons we used across the suite.

Final Set

After concluding the studies, we landed on a final set of icons we felt provided a strong Zebra brand identity, aligned with Zebra’s Design System, and introduced a single visual language for the platforms within Zebra Workcloud.

White-Labeling Options

Lastly, as Zebra serves an enterprise audience, the icons still need to adapt to client environments. We created a set of icons that allows for corporate branding.