
What the hell does ≡ do, anyway? - 5vforest
http://ada.mbecker.cc/post/25113870928/goddamn-three-bars-icon
======
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...](http://ipadinsight.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/iPadKeyboardMovedUpTop.jpg)

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>

~~~
Timothee
I kind of agree for the "drag to reorder" in the stocks apps, but this doesn't
work for Facebook and Bootstrap.

For Facebook, it doesn't work because the grip is not the in the correct
direction. The grip is a skeuomorphism for real grips that go perpendicular to
the movement you want to stop. Here you move your finger horizontally and the
lines are horizontal too.

For Bootstrap, it doesn't work either because the button stays where it is,
whereas the grip should follow your finger or mouse. (see for example, the
grip on the notification center on iOS: [http://iphoneism.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/notification...](http://iphoneism.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/notification-center-ios5-333x500.png))

That being said, I think in both Bootstrap and Facebook, the icon represents a
list: the list of things in the menu and the list of settings (or views) in
Facebook. Even in the iOS stock app, I think it's probably a list too. It can
be interpreted as a grip, but only in the Android version do the graphics
imply it more strongly.

~~~
jaxn
I see twitter bootstrap, facebook, and the sparrow app to all mean the same
thing: view a list of options.

Bootstrap: list of pages

Facebook: list of feeds

Sparrow: list of folders

It makes total sense to me.

------
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.

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Tyr42
In the title, I though it was going to be a math post on congruences. It kinda
lends itself it his point though

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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

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

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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.

------
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.

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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...](http://f.cl.ly/items/0d3o3R0n3z2n2D3P250G/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-15%20at%2010.59.08%20AM.png)

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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.

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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).

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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".

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J0415
I would argue the OS X, Twitter and Facebook examples all have the same
meaning - "click me to see a list of items".

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whalesalad
The example really made me laugh out loud.

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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.

------
lathamcity
What the hell does λ mean? I keep seeing it in all my classes and just can't
get a grip on it.

------
shalmanese
There's a couple of multi-purpose, kitchen sink icons. You have the lines, the
cog, the star, the plus, the dot and maybe a few others. What they mean is "I
wasn't creative enough to come up with a better icon so I'm just going to dump
the kitchen sink of miscellany behind this vague and non-specific icon and let
context do the rest".

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thehigherlife
I've really only seen the 'triple bar' used outside of facebook for meaning
'if and only if' in symbolic logic.

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sparknlaunch
I would have googled "three horizontal lines" but interesting post
nevertheless. From the maths prospective;

" A symbol with three horizontal line segments ( ) resembling the equals sign
is used to denote both equality by definition (e.g., means is defined to be
equal to ) and congruence (e.g., means 13 divided by 12 leaves a remainder of
1--a fact known to all readers of analog clocks)."

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Equal.html>

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batista
> _Even worse is when the offending design is completely out of your control,
> like the kerning on the sign at the Court st. subway station._

Don't see anything wrong with the kerning. It's not a typeset document,
anyway, it's made by some craftman and/or artist as tiles, and this is the
placement that he picked.

It's not like a bad poster made in Word with letter clinging together or
something...

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mkramlich
The root problem is that there's no central authority from which all wisdom
and official validity flows. There's just a bunch of people. Anyone's free to
scribble out whatever and then decide it means whatever. This is just a case
of a collision between two or more domain-specific symbol paradigms in a
single UX space.

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ktizo
Has meant lots of things for a very long time.

乾 (qián), creative force, heaven & sky, northwest, father, head, strong,
creative, horse

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mmukhin
Wow, never noticed.

Looks like a "wildcard" icon/character.

