Comment 8 for bug 287154

I'd like to back up what Martin seems to be getting at. What is the theme going on with the icons? It might be obvious when you explain it, but it should ideally gel almost straight away. Is there a legend somewhere?

The (apparent) pencil icon seems to be representing things we can update. That's OK, but I think some of the link text it's adjacent to doesn't help reinforce that association (e.g. "This report is public"). I'm afraid that unless you have a super-obvious icon, which is difficult to do unobtrusively, you might need clunky text like "[change this]" nearby.

The bug heading itself is presented differently to the other "edit" items. It uses a hyperlinked <img/> with title attribute, whereas the others use a background image and the text is a hyperlink (which presumably initiates the edit action). I think this inconsistent application can be a problem for familiarising users. It probably plays pretty poorly with assistive or non-standard devices, too.

If you decide that you want to provide text more descriptive of the action being offered (like "edit this" as in what I talked about the paragraph before last), I favour using an <img/> like the bug's title has, because it allows you to present the action description in the alt and/or title attribute, while retaining readability in the status description (e.g. "This report is public"). Did that make sense? Let's just say the bug's heading does it best.

The other prominent icon, the green "+", is applied to a variety of actions. I can see that they are kind of all adding information, but it's a mental stretch and ideally it wouldn't be. Maybe you need more groupings with icons, I don't know the answer. So we have "also affects …", "link …", "subscribe…", and "Offer mentorship", but not "Add a comment/attachment" or "Report another bug". It seems ad hoc.

I hope that all helps. I do like where this is trying to go, however.