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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious, but I'm puzzled by his reaction to a hamburger menu:

> Oh-oh. Drag-n-drop icon used for a dropdown menu - May 8, 2021

You're only puzzled because of its ubiquity, and your accustom to it. Nothing about it inherently says 'opens a menu from the side'.

Late "edit": Turns out I'm the confused one! (Bit of sleep dep...) I thought this was the main menu for a page, just in a weird low position, but it's the menu that appears on hover for each item and in this context indeed would be interpreted as a drag handle. In this context perhaps something unambiguous like three vertical dots would have been better?

Also I agree with you -- perhaps the three lines represent a pictogram of a list (vertically stacked menu items?). And the triple dot version is either a compacted version of the same, or a vertical ellipsis?

Sure, but that's not an affordance. If it were vertical instead of horizontal lines for example, it'd be like a grip horizontal pulling.

Horizontal lines (or sometimes an array of dots) are sometimes used as a "grip" icon to represent reorderable list rows.

I know, I've used them in my own designs. It just sounded like he saw a hamburger menu now for the first time 5 weeks ago! Or maybe it is some kind of joke?

This is the case for many people. Another explanation is that he was being empathetic.

As a designer himself, he probably tries to approach design examinations from many different perspectives (we do this at work with new designs: if I was an 70 year old woman, what would I see here?) to find edge cases where the design doesn't work.

Hamburger menu icons usually have a fixed position and are part of a header or something of that sort. Floating lines like that would always read as "drag grip" to me.

Everyone sees the hamburger icon for the first time. It certainly isn't obvious what it means. You need to decide what is more important, that your site look contemporary or that your users can find the information/product/service they are looking for.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

We have found that people are afraid to mess things up, and don’t know what three lines means, so never click them. A lot more than you would think.

I don't think I'd seen a hamburger menu rendered on a list, for each item, before. Normally a "hamburger menu" appears once, probably at the top of the page, in some kind of navigation bar. In that context, that icon definitely reads "drag to re-order list item" to me.

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