Question

Are there any visual cues that you know of that indicate an item’s “draggability”?

The obvious ones:

• “<marque>Click here to drag!</marque>”
• an icon
• and (which I plan to implement) the closed-hand-cursor-onmouseover

Thanks for you help!

Answer 1

I really cannot explain why, but the drag background icon thingy on the iphone makes some sense to me. Its just threee horizontal lines. In a web application that I develop and sell, people understood that immediately (well, on a classical “mouse UI” the mouse pointer gfx also changes to the former one you mentioned, thats some very important additional clue for mouse user interfaces).

I also immediately associated it with a draggable thing! Just three horizontal lines…

But then it only makes sense for some sort of draggable row or line. I don’t know what’s your intended application requires in detail.

The background (just three simple horizontal lines): alt text http://manjadigital.de/demo/s/d/f/c/a/sortierer_greifer.gif

Example usage on iPhone:
_{(source: creativealgorithms.com)}