I think the current set of icons (and also their descriptions) lack clarity:
- The "talk page" icon is a duplicate of the "Notifictions" icon. Therefore one thinks it has something to do with notifications. I didn't guess that it was related to my talk page in the first place.
- The "watchlist" icon is very ambiguous:
It is basically a copy of the "add to watchlist icon"
It is also used as "add to favorites" in Internet Explorer or "add to bookmarks" star icon in Firefox.
Therfore this is exactly the functionality one expects: Adding something to watchlist, not opening the actual watchlist.- The second point is even made worse by the fact that the stars tooltip doesn't include the word "Watchlist". What is "A list of pages you are monitoring for changes"??? Just call the child by it's name! The tooltip isn't a help page after all...
- The "contributions" icon is very ambiguous:
A bar diagram is normally used for statistics. Special:Contributions does not contain any statistics on Wikipedia though! It's a plain list of edits a user has made. This should be reflected by the icon.