About documenting menus without label

[sajolida <sajolida pimienta org>]

Hi,

This is my first email to this list so I'll introduce myself. I'm the
main documentation writer for Tails [1], a live operating system for
privacy and anonymity based on Debian and GNOME.

[1]: https://tails.boum.org/

We're preparing the release of Tails based on Debian Jessie, and thus
GNOME Shell and we're updating our doc.

I wonder what's your best practice to refer to the new style of menus or
buttons that don't have a label anymore. You know, the menus with the
single-gear, the double-gear, the three stripes, etc.

See this screenshot [2] for an example of how we're referring
to them right now. We're inlining the icon of the menu in the
instructions: "Click on the * button" in the top-right corner...".

[2]: https://share.riseup.net/#3igV6AM-uvCHaZicPoBVCg

But I still feel that this is more prone to confusion that the good old
menus with unique labels. For example, we did some user testing of our
new installation instructions in November and in GNOME Disks some user
confused the single-gear menu (applying to the whole disk) with the
double-gear menu (applying to a single partition) and got into deep
troubles. That's why we added screenshots on where the menu is but that
would be a bit cumbersome to do every time...

I also through about inlining the whole button (with it's square gray
background) in the instructions, instead of just its icon.

What do you do usually?