Possible Duplicate:
Most intuitive favorite icon
Which conveys the concept of favorites better? I'm working on a news reader, and this could be a desirable feature.
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1Depends on your audience. If they're GReader users, I guess star is for them. If they're older people, not that much used to IT concepts, bookmark is a better choice. – Aadaam Oct 14 '12 at 3:35
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2What is the functionality of the favorites? – fwr Oct 14 '12 at 11:18
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Persist several references to articles, for future reading between sessions. – Hayk Saakian Oct 14 '12 at 12:13
The best choice here depends on when a user would use the 'favorite' function.
If the goal is simply to flag an article so it can be found later easily, like marking a page in a book, the bookmark metaphor is a good one. Most web browsers use the bookmark term/icon because the function is to make a page easy to come back to.
On the other hand, if 'favorite' is more broad, consider using the star (or a heart like Instapaper uses). In my newsreader, I use favorites for both bookmarking articles I want to find later and for marking articles that I simply really like. At that point, the bookmark metaphor no longer makes sense: you don't mark every page you like in a book. Additionally, some newsreaders use favorites as a social feature (e.g. tweeting when you favorite an article or making your favorites list visible on a profile page). At that point the bookmark really turns into a forced metaphor, and, in my opinion, should be removed. A star or heart, though, is broad enough to work well here.
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1thanks for the answer, since in my case a bookmark works very much like a real bookmark, i think i'll go with that. the one oddity i've encountered though is that in google chrome, they use the term bookmark, but use filled/unfilled stars to create/destroy bookmarks. I feel like a star makes less direct sense, but is pretty good as an icon unlike a little bookmark (see twitter bootstrap) that does not really have an obvious on/off state. your thoughts? – Hayk Saakian Oct 15 '12 at 21:01
