Monday, December 19, 2016

android - List icon vs menu icon


As of Ice Cream Sandwich, the new standard icon for menus is three vertically aligned squares as such:


ICS menu icon example



Before that, the menu expansion was three horizontal lines like this, but without the triangle:


enter image description here


Annoyingly enough, that icon (again, without the triangle) looks a lot like a list. In fact it looks so much like it that I have a hard time picking something else to signify a list view of something.


Even Google's own Roman Nurik has used that icon for a list (pre-ICS):


enter image description here


But yet it's not consistent or clear that it is not the menu icon. I have gotten feedback from multiple long-time Android users that the list view looks like a menu icon to them. Even worse, Facebook still uses the list to mean menu:


enter image description here


And Chrome on OS X uses it to mean menu as well (Jelly Bean Android uses the three squares):


enter image description here


So my question is this:



What is the correct (according to Google) and consistent icon to indicate a list view as of the latest Google OS?


Is confusion from users to be expected and should we just deal with it until pre-ICS users die off and everyone is on board with the new icon set?



Answer



Google's Action Bar Icon Pack (link taken from this page) includes a special icon specifically for this purpose (the icon name is 4-collections-view-as-list.png):


Android View As List icon


The three-dots symbol you list is called ic_action_overflow.png (corroborating DA01's comment that the symbol means overflow—as in 'more…'—not necessarily menu).


Android's convention for menus is the arrow you mentioned in the question, and apps are really taking to the sort of thing your Facebook example uses. In fact Google have added the same exact control to its mobile website:


Google's mobile website demonstrating the menu icon
Image from Search Engine Roundtable


There's a StackOverflow question about those kinds of menus with some interesting examples too.



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