Enhancing user guides with Iconify
In this article, I'll share my experience with Iconify and provide a guide on how to install it in your Docusaurus project.
Iconify is a tool that provides access to an extensive library of over 200,000 icons from various open-source icon sets. It allows you to embed icons as SVGs, ensuring they are scalable and customizable through CSS. This means you can easily adjust design, color, and size to match your project's style without the hassle of editing individual image files. With Iconify, integrating a vast range of icons into your digital content becomes straightforward and efficient.
When I first started incorporating icons into my user guides, I quickly realized the challenges of managing them as static images. The process was cumbersome and time-consuming, especially when maintaining consistency. I began searching for a more efficient solution that required minimal manual intervention, and that's when I came across Iconify.
The initial installation wasn't straightforward—it didn't work out of the box for my project. After some experimentation and discussions with GPT, I successfully integrated Iconify. My first use of Iconify was within our internal documentation portal, followed by this very blog. Having struggled initially, my second attempt at integration was effortless, as I knew exactly what steps to follow.
Where to use Iconify icons
Icons aren't merely decorative—they actively enhance comprehension and usability. Here are just a few cases where you can leverage Iconify:
- In user guides: When you write user guides, it's common that buttons, navigation menus, and other UI elements contain icons within their names. Including the same icons directly in the user guides significantly improves user-friendliness, making it easier to identify UI components quickly. This approach aligns perfectly if your documentation policy aims at minimizing the use of screenshots by offering clearer visual cues.
- On social media: You can use Iconify to seamlessly integrate recognizable social media icons into your documentation portals or blogs. Iconify icons are easily customizable in terms of design, color, and size, which ensures consistency across your content. Additionally, you can assign links to these icons just as you would with markdown text.
Cons of icons as images
When I initially started using icons, I embedded them as static image files. However, this method had clear limitations, which prompted me to search for a more appropriate solution.
- Maintenance limitations: Adjusting icon colors or sizes required editing each image individually—a highly time-consuming task. It becomes especially challenging when, for example, your company updates its design guidelines and changes the colors of multiple icons. In that scenario, if you're not using a dynamic solution like Iconify, the benefits of using icons in your docs quickly turn into a significant headache.
- Scalability issues: With static images, you're limited to the originally chosen resolution. If you need to scale up a small icon, it becomes pixelated or distorted on high-resolution displays, necessitating additional rounds of edits and updates.
- Performance concerns: Embedding multiple image files not only increases the load time but also complicates content management. With Iconify, icons are served as optimized SVGs that load quickly and scale perfectly, making the entire documentation more responsive and efficient.
Use cases
To illustrate the practical benefits of Iconify, let’s compare user guide instructions without and with icons.
| Without icons | With icons |
|---|---|
| - You can use Copy and Delete buttons: These buttons let you duplicate or remove items from settings. | - You can use Copy and Delete buttons: These buttons let you duplicate or remove items from settings. |
| - To expand the configuration section, under the Block rules section, click the expander arrow. | - To expand the configuration section, under the Block rules section, click the expander arrow. |
| - Go to the Products page, and for the product you want to edit, click Edit. | - Go to the Products page, and for the product you want to edit, click Edit. |
Since users can see both the UI item names and their respective icons, using such docs can make their lives even easier while requiring minimal effort from you.
How to start using Iconify
If you decided to give Iconify a try, you can use the official docs or my guide:
- For general integration steps, refer to the official Iconify documentation.
- If you're specifically working with Docusaurus, I have prepared an easy-to-follow guide. I used these steps to install Iconify in this very project. Check it out here: Integrate Iconify.