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How the lock icon can mislead you

The importance of iconography in communication and highlights how design adapts to changing user needs and preferences while keeping up with technological advancements.

Rishi Shah
UX Collective
7 min readMay 6, 2023
lock icon
Cover designed by Rishi Shah

When you visit a website using the Chrome browser, you may notice a small lock icon 🔒 in the address bar. This icon is meant to signify that the site you’re visiting is secure and using HTTPS encryption. But as it turns out, not everyone understands what the lock icon really means, and this has led to some serious security concerns.

The idea behind the lock icon when a site loads over HTTPS dates back to the early versions of Netscape in the 1990s. In recent years, Chrome has been a major advocate for increasing HTTPS adoption on the web to make the web more secure by default. As late as 2013, only 14% of the Alexa Top 1M sites supported HTTPS. However, today, HTTPS has become the norm, and over 95% of page loads in Chrome on Windows are over a secure channel using HTTPS. This is great news for the ecosystem; and due to the high adoption of Chrome, people are more familiar with the lock icon, which is meant to convey trust and inform site owners to upgrade their technology and use HTTPS for better security. The lock icon drew attention to the additional protections provided by HTTPS.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Rishi Shah

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

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