What the hell does ≡ do, anyway?

[gdubs]

Context matters. I think it's acceptable for that icon to mean 'list' in one context, and 'justify' in another. Using it to mean 'menu' is a little confusing though. Sure, there's a list of menu items, but in the context of Facebook it looks a lot more like a list of posts – i.e., newsfeed.

[snprbob86]

Both Justify and List make sense in context of their neighbors. All the other uses are by themselves and they don't mean "menu" they mean "drag from here". The icon is called a "drag handle".

See, for example, the four little lines on the bottom right key on the iPad keyboard: http://ipadinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/iPadKeyboa...

Or the three little lines in the bottom right corner (drag diagonally) of pre-Lion OSX (drag from any edge): http://www.cs.williams.edu/~freund/cs136-073/unix/window.jpg

[DannoHung]

In the "Here's something you can drag" version, I think it's supposed to look like a textured indicator you might find on a tool or other real world object to show you where you place your hand.

In the Facebook example, I think the "..." icon would have been better and in the Twitter bootstrap, a gear would have been vastly more appropriate.

[jacobr]

Just like I don't expect the magnifying glass in a search field to zoom in, nor the same icon in Gimp to search.

[lotu]

Right context is king. For example, "don't desert me here in the desert." English is littered with example of writing and speech this ambigus in isolation, but we don't be come confused in our daily lives because the context makes it clear. This is no different.

[Karunamon]

Has the author never heard of context sensitivity before? Somehow I've never had this problem understanding what that button would do in a given context.

[teilo]

Yeah, I suspect that the other doesn't have this problem either.

[Tyr42]

In the title, I though it was going to be a math post on congruences. It kinda lends itself it his point though

[andreasvc]

This is exactly the way language works: words can have multiple senses, from which the context should pick out the one intended. If you look up common words, you'll find they have a multitude of different senses (sometimes unrelated). In fact, the more frequent a word is, the more senses it is likely to have.

[fusiongyro]

The other side of recognizing that this is a language issue is recognizing that we're raising the bar for computer literacy. My mother isn't likely to figure out what the three lines mean in any context, because she simply isn't all that computer literate.

Now, in the mid-late 90s she would have had no trouble recognizing the save icon—the floppy disk was what she was probably saving to anyway, and there it is on the icon. People 20 and under are unlikely to have had real experiences with floppy disks, so to them, the floppy icon is just what the save icon happens to look like, for no ideographic reason at all. That's just what save icons look like, and they recognize it, because it's part of basic computer literacy.

I think it's healthy of people on HN to recognize this as a language issue, because that's what it is, but there should be some corresponding philosophy: do we want to keep moving towards digital hieroglyphics or do we want to strive to retain representativeness in icon imagery? More meanings and context sensitivity for differentiation, as is the case with the three lines, is certainly the abstract direction.

[robertskmiles]

My Algorithms lecturer called it the "equivils" symbol, as in "like equals but meaning exactly equivalent to".

I thought that was a standard name until I tried to use it around someone from a different university. I had to google it to prove I wasn't crazy, and when google came up with only four random hits, I was forced to concede that I may well in fact be crazy after all.

I can't decide if he thought equivils was the best name for it, or if he was just trying to make it so we couldn't google solutions to his assignments...

[_sh]

I call it the 'ideq' (pronounced eye-deck), a portmanteau of 'identity equals' because in my scheme background, equivalent (eqv?) is less strict than equal (eq?). The 'identity' part of the name, in programming context, means the address of the item.

So in order of strictness: equivalent < equal < ideq

[sandollars]

No, you do not have OCD. Having an interest in icons does not mean you have OCD.

[Stefan_H]

It seems that some people use it to represent something that you can have traction on, like for dragable items (the slide to open camera on the iphone lock screen and the dragable reording from the writer's example).

[bemmu]

Three things means "many". In this case three lines means "many lines".

In view as list, the files are displayed as each file on a line. In justify the text goes from being snippets of various sizes to being a bunch of full lines. In drag to reorder the many lines make you think of ribbed texture of that thing you can drag against. In settings when you tap on many lines, you arrive at a screen that has many lines of settings.

[housel]

Then there's also the potential confusion with 三 (the Chinese character for "three").

[needle0]

No there isn't. I'm Japanese, 三 is indeed used as three, but is almost always written with the three lines having varying lengths, in the order of of longer-shortest-longest. I can't speak for the Chinese but it will, at the least, require a huge amount of contextual suggestion for a Japanese to interpret three lines of equal length as a Kanji 三.

[leothekim]

Congruence relation!

[sturmeh]

That's certainly what I see it as!

However the other people are right, it's highly context dependant.

[zht]

before clicking on the article I assumed this would be an article about the congruence relation

[iambateman]

It's fairly clear in most cases, except Facebook's usage. It took me forever to figure out what was going on in Facebook's app.

The much worse icon-fail imho is the "share" concept. http://cl.ly/2j1a40461E1B2U0X2W2q <-- Apple's version is ok, but doesn't seem like "share" and there are many much worse.

[philfreo]

Forgot about the one in Google Docs at the bottom of a Spreadsheet that means "View all sheets"

http://f.cl.ly/items/0d3o3R0n3z2n2D3P250G/Screen%20Shot%2020...

[ThomPete]

As with everything else in UI and interface design.

What is learned is what is intuitive. There are no silver bullets, no objective meaning of things. Only an acquired understanding.

All attempts to use metaphors to make understanding of functionality easier are basically in a war for acceptance and adoption.

It is perfectly reasonable to us it to mean those things if that becomes the standard.

[squareweave]

Context matters.

Also, there's also the simple "If Apple, Twitter and Facebook do it, bad luck, we gotta play along" rule.

P.S. Starting with "While I may be far from a UX guy" doesn't seem like the most positive way to start an article.

P.P.S. Somewhat flattered that oursay.org was used - somewhat badly - in the final example.

[Kevin_Marks]

The use as a menu button dates back at least to the Sidekick II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SidekickII.jpg (though that has one long and 2 short lines).

[dfox]

It was used long time before that. Many TUI DOS aplications (especially Turbo Vision based or copying Turbo Vision UI style) use this character for leftmost item of menubar with "system" things and utilities like calculator (obviously inspired by Mac OS's Apple menu).

[evoxed]

Those rag icons, while common, are just oversimplified. It's good enough for word processing, but ideally your set would be something more like:

|≡| (justify full)

While it could still be a list, it associates much better with alignment.

[panacea]

You're right that it's oversimplified, but your alternative isn't better. Horizontal lines are lines of type, but vertical lines are container borders? Simply using 4 or 5 rather than 3 horizontal lines would be best.

Also, FTA "Twitter Bootstrap refers to it as “icon-align-justify"

Actually the latest version of Font Awesome has three line icon for "icon-reorder" and four line icon for "icon-align-justify"

[alanh]

Interesting post, and I think the Bootstrap example might be the least reasonable of the bunch, but certainly as a “list”, “justify”, or “vertical drag” icon I have never found it confusing.

[jaxn]

He got the Bootstrap usage completely wrong. The icon gives you access to the top-level menu items on smaller screens. Nothing to do with "settings".

[J0415]

I would argue the OS X, Twitter and Facebook examples all have the same meaning - "click me to see a list of items".

[whalesalad]

The example really made me laugh out loud.

[damoncali]

What does "minute" mean, anyway?

Somehow it all works out.

[sopooneo]

This is the second comment related to a point of trivia about the English language. A lot of words have related noun and verb forms distinguished in speech only by the emphasis being placed at the end in the verb form.

Off the top of my head: desert, refuse, construct. You start noticing them all the time after you see the pattern.