[eddieh]

Actually the icon looks like three menu items. It is a pretty good icon for signaling that it will open a menu. The hamburger nomenclature seems to be an ex pos facto name for something that rightfully should be called the menu icon.

[alxlaz]

> the icon looks like three menu items

It's a nondescript icon made of three horizontal bars, it looks like literally anything that comes in threes. My mom calls it the pancake button and my fourteen year-old nephew used to call it the button with something that looks like a fork but without a handle until he switched to the "meh" button once he became a nihilist (teenagers do that stuff sometimes). A menu with three items is very likely to be among the last things that crosses a non-techie's mind.

At this point it's been used enough that anyone with enough exposure to electronics knows what it does, but it's hardly a better choice than the "File" menu. The point of making something intuitive, as opposed to explicit (i.e. by using a symbol as opposed to spelling out) is kindda missed if you need to "well actually" it and explain why it means whatever it means.

[collyw]

I disagree. It took around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it clicked that it was a common symbol for a menu. Its getting worse and seems to be getting replaced by 3 vertical dots now.

[eddieh]

I just think of the 3 vertical dots as vertical ellipsis. I often use vertical ellipsis when making a list that continues. e.g.

— History of Empire and Colonialism

— History of Religion and Society

— History of Race, Gender, and Power

  ⋮

— History of War and Society

So it naturally means "there is more stuff here" to me. YMMV

[collyw]

In your context it does make sense. As a menu button it doesn't (to me at least).

[eitland]

I can only speak for myself, but for me who grew up with C64, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, Linux, Windows XP more Linux etc that icon still didn't make sense until I got it explained.

Then again, the magnifykng glass icon for search didn't make sense either until I read the docs but at least back then people made docs and kept the UI stable enough so that it made sense to learn it.

I still remember fondly being good with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) in a Microsoft Works.

[collyw]

The old days seemed so much more intuitive when there was a crappy low res icon with text underneath.

[eitland]

Not sure if you are sarcastic and in what way, but if I understand you correctly you think we are better off now.

I think we would be better off if we kept the best from both: the predictability and discoverability of the past with the niceness of today.

Why should we have to choose between nice and usable?

[collyw]

No I think that having a bit of descriptive text below an icon was far more useful than far prettier world of nicely rounded corners on hamburger menus that we have today.