[HN Gopher] Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)
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       Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)
        
       Author : bradley_taunt
       Score  : 147 points
       Date   : 2022-03-16 12:04 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tdarb.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tdarb.org)
        
       | gowld wrote:
       | The analysis of Good and Bad is good, and strongly convincing why
       | Bad wins.
        
       | BatmansMom wrote:
       | Takes up way more space, the point of the page isn't to serve
       | menu options. They should be tucked away until the user
       | determines they want to use them. Also its so hard to scroll the
       | window without accidentally clicking the buttons on mobile.
        
       | autoexec wrote:
       | > Zero JavaScript needed
       | 
       | As someone who has JS disabled by default I was happy to see this
       | and excited to see what 'sausage links' look like, but when I
       | went to the link I was hit with a giant "CodePen requires
       | JavaScript to render the code and preview areas in this view."
       | 
       | Since this person has a website (this isn't a tweet or something)
       | and feels it's "Pretty simple, eh?" to implement such a menu,
       | _and_ already wrote up some sample code, why not have the example
       | on the page itself? At least I have the code so I can copy/paste
       | and throw it back in the browser, but the author came soooo close
       | to making that unnecessary I can't help but wonder what happened
       | or what their thought process was.
        
         | bo1024 wrote:
         | I also was frustrated that CodePen seemed to need to set a
         | cookie before it would function.
        
         | pygy_ wrote:
         | Yeah, for that use case, https://bl.ocks.org is better than
         | CodePen. Publish a GitHub gist, replace gist.github.com with
         | bl.ocks.org, and sneak in "/raw" between the username and the
         | gist id. You can even point to specific commit hashes.
        
       | KimJongUndrpnz wrote:
        
       | zamalek wrote:
       | > Without proper fade / cut off visual cues, users may not
       | understand they can scroll
       | 
       | You could resolve this by connecting the sausages with a line.
       | The continuity would give the user a hint that something is going
       | off to the right.
        
       | kazinator wrote:
       | > _I should start by mentioning that this concept is far from
       | new. There are a good number of websites that already implement
       | this menu type in some form or another. The point of this post
       | isn't to blow your mind with some new-never-thought-of navigation
       | design. I'm just trying to bring awareness to another available
       | menu concept._
       | 
       | More like "I'm just trying to bring awareness to my blog, and go
       | down in UI history as the person remembered for the term _sausage
       | link menu_ ".
        
       | spansoa wrote:
       | The bulk of my browsing is done with JS turned off, and I'm
       | astonished how many sites rely on a JS-powered hamburger menu, so
       | I have to enable JS on specific sites just to use their menu!
       | There are pure CSS ways to do hamburger menus, and I encourage
       | all devs to use pure CSS for a hamburger menu for those visitors
       | who browse with JS disabled by default!
       | 
       | For those curious: I have JS turned off because of privacy
       | reasons, and accessibility. I find having JS turned off decreases
       | the amount of annoyances and popups you see when browsing, and
       | the 'fingerprintability' of the browser is drastically reduced.
        
         | zelphirkalt wrote:
         | Wait, but then web developers would need to actually learn
         | their standard tools like HTML and CSS and how to achieve the
         | goal with a minimalist approach. They might need to invest an
         | hour or two, instead of downloading an NPM package and slapping
         | everything with a meg of JS.
         | 
         | Not sure how realistic this is. When I look at most websites
         | these days, I can see clear signs of bad engineering (and lack
         | of ethics) everywhere.
         | 
         | I am totally on board with the idea to use CSS for things,
         | where we do not need JS. But then again I am not a "modern
         | style" web developer.
         | 
         | In my opinion knowing one or two hip and trendy web frameworks
         | (I will intentionally not say their names now.) doesn't make
         | anyone a good web developer. Real basics are lacking these
         | days. When you only have a hammer, everything starts looking
         | like the head of a nail. Websites with zero requirement of
         | dynamic pages are rendered in JS frameworks, even taking longer
         | than static server side rendering of some template, which could
         | have been used, given the character of the websites. All done
         | under the guise of "This is how websites are developed these
         | days." No, not all websites need to be a SPA.
         | 
         | Anyone, who learned a framework can call themselves web
         | developer these days. I am sure there are good web developers
         | out there, who know their stuff and the basics as well. Even
         | good ones working on the websites I criticize, but they may be
         | forced to use inappropriate tooling by their environment. One
         | does not simply come into an existing project and decide
         | oneself to change a whole stack. Basically many projects are
         | already locked into their inappropriate use of tools.
        
       | ftio wrote:
       | No no no. Hamburger menus are terrible[0] for navigation, and
       | this is worse. The only user-centric "Pro" listed by the author,
       | namely that users understand its functionality, is totally
       | unsubstantiated, and I think, exactly the opposite of what is
       | true.
       | 
       | These kinds of menus are fine as "filtering inspiration",
       | shortcuts for commonly chosen filters on a dataset, but they are
       | not at all OK as general navigation. They hide the vast majority
       | of menu items, especially in a long list; their sorting logic is
       | typically impenetrable; and horizontal scrolling is terrible on a
       | huge array of devices.
       | 
       | On mobile, prefer a tab bar for navigation. If you have a huge
       | number of top-level items, deeply consider your information
       | architecture before downgrading to a hamburger menu. I won't go
       | on, but I could.
       | 
       | Please do not use this ridiculous thing for navigation.
       | 
       | 0. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | tbran wrote:
         | Please do go on! I'd love to hear more of you thoughts on
         | better menus or better info architecture.
         | 
         | I have a project that _could_ have many menu items, and the
         | sausage is an interesting idea but not common /well known
         | enough that I'd want to use it. Tabs might work.
         | 
         | For many websites, there are SEO implications to having menu
         | links (or so we are lead to believe) so I think ridiculous
         | menus are sometimes partly a consequence of optimizing for SEO.
        
         | slimsag wrote:
         | I love this type of highly-opinionated design thoughts. At work
         | we have a pretty complex UI that seems a little bit inescapable
         | to me (hard to keep legible due to complexity, etc.) Could I
         | get you to critique it?
         | 
         | https://sourcegraph.com/search
         | 
         | https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+errorf&patte...
        
           | hallway_monitor wrote:
           | Disclaimer: am dev, not designer. Home / welcome feels good,
           | search is front and center but I can find out more easily.
           | Results are eye-friendly as well. I would suggest getting rid
           | of the internal scroll panes in the left bar if possible -
           | it's difficult to scroll that and / or the left nav or the
           | main page. Maybe show the top N and then a "show more" or
           | expand / collapse button.
        
         | pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
         | So you're saying that either is mystery meat navigation?
        
           | amarshall wrote:
           | See also:
           | https://twitter.com/LukeW/status/591296890030915585/photo/1
        
         | cobertos wrote:
         | Horizontal scrolling isn't that bad on mobile devices. I
         | wouldn't want to scroll one of these on desktop but it's so
         | simple to just, flick through it with my finger on a phone.
         | 
         | Just put it behind a media query when your desktop-sized nav
         | bar gets too big?
        
           | chrisweekly wrote:
           | Strong disagree. Horizontal scrolling ~= bad UX.
        
             | seltzered_ wrote:
             | It's not bad UX per se (I love it for certain mobile uses),
             | but it's bad to make an assumption that horizontal
             | scrolling is always available.
             | 
             | Similarly, it's bad to assume that everyone is always using
             | a keyboard and mouse (a frustration I encounter in Desktop
             | environment communities (e.g. Gnome / Linux) in gesturing
             | that some use tablet PCs).
        
           | AlexandrB wrote:
           | It can be OK in _some_ cases, but it can be hard to discover
           | unless it 's very obvious. Thanks to Apple hiding scroll
           | bars, if the elements in a horizontal scroll happen to line
           | up with the edge of the screen it can be impossible to tell
           | that horizontal scrolling is even an option unless you
           | trigger it accidentally.
           | 
           | Edit: Oh yeah, and horizontal scrolling interacts
           | unpredicatably with horizontal gestures on mobile. E.g.
           | forward/back in iOS Safari.
        
             | jokteur wrote:
             | Once I got confused on Google maps android, because I
             | thought they had removed the "Share" button. It was a
             | sausage menu, but the size of the buttons were such that
             | the rest of the buttons were perfectly hidden (you could
             | not see the rest of a half button) and of course there was
             | no visible horizontal scrollbar.
        
           | u2077 wrote:
           | > Horizontal scrolling isn't that bad on mobile devices
           | 
           | I disagree, it's not easily discoverable and I have yet to
           | see a single website that implements it well in any context.
           | I alway find elements scrolling multiple directions at once
           | or end up scrolling down the page instead.
        
           | slaymaker1907 wrote:
           | I suspect the writer of this blog post wrote it on a machine
           | with a track pad or a magic mouse.
        
         | seanp2k2 wrote:
         | I had to read the article a few times to figure out that I was
         | supposed to scroll horizontally. When I did that in Chrome on
         | MacOS, the following happened:
         | 
         | - the notification widgets popped out from the right of my
         | screen
         | 
         | - The entire center-aligned blocks of text on the page moved
         | over in relation to my scrolling for some reason
         | 
         | - The browser navigated "back"
         | 
         | - The H scroll bar appeared for a few seconds then went away
         | 
         | Some of these were due to my cursor being outside of the 'nav
         | class="sausage-links"' tag, but it seems strange to expect a
         | user to first place their cursor inside of an invisible box
         | somewhere around the nav strip to be able to navigate it by
         | scrolling to and fro.
         | 
         | Seriously, H scroll is way overloaded, and there are so many
         | ways to subtly "do it wrong". That, combined with the lack of
         | affordance to show users that "there is more to see here if you
         | scroll left and right" makes this a really poor UX.
        
           | titanomachy wrote:
           | - The entire center-aligned blocks of text on the page moved
           | over in relation to my scrolling for some reason
           | 
           | This one kind of makes sense to me. It's the browser's way of
           | telling you "you're doing the right thing to scroll the whole
           | page over, but there's no content outside of your viewport so
           | we'll just snap you back after we let you peek to see for
           | yourself".
           | 
           | The rest... yeah, it's definitely an overloaded pattern.
        
         | satyrnein wrote:
         | _If you have a huge number of top-level items, deeply consider
         | your information architecture before downgrading to a hamburger
         | menu._
         | 
         | Ir seems like you can hide all the items (hamburger menu), hide
         | some of the items (sausage links or overflow menu), or have a
         | deep hierarchical navigation.
         | 
         | While breadcrumbs were fairly established on desktop, mobile
         | apps typically only have a single-level back/up button. It's
         | easy to lose your place if you have a deep hierarchy. Are there
         | are good solutions for this?
        
           | TuringTest wrote:
           | Accordions, lists where selecting one item scrolls the view
           | one screen to the right to show a sublist... there are many
           | common idioms for nested structures.
           | 
           | But the best strategy is always to simplify the number of
           | different nodes to flatten navigation as much as possible.
        
       | danielyaa5 wrote:
       | The only thing I like about this is the name
        
       | oldstrangers wrote:
       | I thought this was presented as a tongue in cheek kind of thing,
       | but I guess its not. =(
        
       | fleddr wrote:
       | As for the bad of hamburger menus:
       | 
       | "Adds an additional point of interaction from the user (click to
       | open, then proceed to read through available options)"
       | 
       | The real world impact of this downside cannot be emphasized
       | enough. People click on things they can see by several factors
       | more (sometimes 10 times more) compared to the "clean design"
       | approach. This is why in very large companies there's internal
       | political battles on which links get to be placed in this prime
       | digital real estate.
       | 
       | Sausage links is a weird name though. They're horizontally
       | scroll-able menu items, which can be anything: links, icons,
       | pills, combinations.
       | 
       | As for this creating an ugly scrollbar on desktop, this pattern
       | is for about 6-8 links max, which should all horizontally fit
       | without a scrollbar on desktop.
       | 
       | As for the "problem" of this not supporting longer lists of links
       | or even hierarchical links, don't bother, because those don't
       | work anyway. I work on very large ecommerce sites and in one case
       | (billion+ page views across 80 countries) even a 3 tier
       | navigation structure found only 8% of users actually using it.
       | And the trend is downwards, as mobile traffic is now 70%. Nobody
       | navigates beyond level 1.
       | 
       | Finally, some polish for the demo: scroll fading should be
       | stronger so that people get that it is horizontally scrollable.
       | Also, use CSS scroll snapping. This way when people give a strong
       | swipe, it doesn't keep going when you let go, it snaps into a
       | favorable position.
        
       | bjornlouser wrote:
        
       | jfoster wrote:
       | For hamburger menus, I would add an item under "the bad" that
       | they make every website feel like it's intended for mobile.
       | 
       | I think one significant advantage of sausage links is that they
       | feel less uniquely intended for any single form factor.
        
       | evanmoran wrote:
       | I enjoyed thinking about this. A few thoughts on usability!
       | 
       | The text on these sausage links makes the buttons quite visible
       | and readable, but I find these joined buttons to be most helpful
       | when one is always active and the options are mutually exclusive.
       | For example, at the bottom the zoom buttons (1x, 0.5x, 0.25x) do
       | this very well. One is always highlighted so it's very easy to
       | understand the current state and to pick a different state.
       | 
       | I'd argue this works less well in the top-left buttons (HTML,
       | SCSS) because there is a hidden behavior that collapse and
       | expands the sidebar. It's clever, but I didn't expect the bar to
       | open, nor did I expect it to close when I tapped it a second
       | time. It workes pretty well in this website preview example
       | because html/css feels like good use of the side panel, but I'd
       | argue most hamburger buttons hide much more rarely used views
       | like logout, account and privacy settings, payment options, etc,
       | so not sure the sausage links can replace all these, but an
       | interesting thought experiment.
        
       | uallo wrote:
       | On our website we do a similar thing. But we just wrap the
       | navigation to multiple lines. Of course, that only works when you
       | don't have that many navigation items. But when there are only
       | few of them, I prefer wrapping over having to scroll.
        
       | jokethrowaway wrote:
       | Not a fan of hamburger menu but I disagree this is an
       | improvement, the scrollbar wasn't visible on my platform (chrome,
       | mac) and it wasn't clear how to scroll.
       | 
       | I'm not even sure how I would horizontally scroll with a mouse (I
       | seem to remember something about hold middle clicking and
       | dragging).
       | 
       | Why not just have all the links in multiple rows or have a few
       | subcategories + expand and navigate through the list of links?
        
       | onion2k wrote:
       | Clear menus that aren't hidden away are great, but a
       | _significant_ problem with horizontal  'sausage' menus is that it
       | isn't obvious that you can scroll, especially on Apple devices
       | that hide scrollbars. The article mentions this as a bit of an
       | after-thought ("Without proper fade / cut off visual cues, users
       | may not understand they can scroll") but it's the key reason why
       | you should avoid them.
       | 
       | To demonstrate, I've forked the example and set the main element
       | to 625px wide instead of 600px -
       | https://codepen.io/onion2k/pen/mdpVWmr
        
         | davidspiess wrote:
         | Airbnb comes to mind, they added left and right arrows to their
         | tabs. https://imgur.com/a/MXDabnS
        
         | jdsampayo wrote:
         | You can edit ::-webkit-scrollbar to always show it -
         | https://codepen.io/jdsampayo/pen/zYprwao
         | 
         | Not a fan but could be forced if needed.
         | 
         | Based on - https://stackoverflow.com/a/7855592/1342097
        
         | ddlutz wrote:
         | Yeah it took me several minutes to figure out how to scroll on
         | a macbook because there is no visible scrollsbar, to hit right
         | arrow, and then the scroll bar appeared. I couldn't click and
         | drag it.
        
         | josho wrote:
         | That's solved by adjusting the scroll starting position so that
         | the first element is partially offscreen. It may initially look
         | jarring, like the designer made a mistake but it provides a
         | nice visual affordance that you can scroll and it will work
         | regardless of the screen width.
         | 
         | https://codepen.io/blipo/pen/Rwxrgpd
        
           | onion2k wrote:
           | Now your menu requires JS though, which isn't ideal,
           | especially on a brochure site that could work perfectly well
           | without it.
        
       | kfarr wrote:
       | I just went ahead and made the hamburger menu look like a
       | hamburger in this (out of date) project: https://aframe.city/
        
       | didip wrote:
       | Why not slot machine menu?
       | 
       | Same idea, but vertical scrolling 3 items at a time and the list
       | is a circular linked list.
        
       | klyrs wrote:
       | That implementation is annoying to scroll on my desktop. I can
       | only imagine that I'd sausage-finger a button trying to scroll it
       | on my phone. No thanks.
        
       | tpoacher wrote:
       | how about just good old plain html links that reflow exactly how
       | you want them to?
       | 
       | </luddite>
        
       | thrusong wrote:
       | I could see "sausage" catching on, but I knew these as "pill"
       | buttons or links up until now.
        
       | kulix425 wrote:
        
       | Zecc wrote:
       | These are not the sausage links I thought they would be.
       | 
       | The sausage links I remember were older than internet on mobile
       | being a thing, they were laid out vertically, and they were
       | proportional in size to the target sections such that clicking a
       | link or clicking the scrollbar right at their side would
       | essentially scroll you to the same place on the page.
       | 
       | They were, in my opinion, a much better paradigm than this.
       | 
       | Alas I cannot easily find the demo page again. It might have been
       | lost to history.
        
       | timwis wrote:
       | Interesting idea, but (a) unless you ensure the second or third
       | item is cut-off on all device sizes (may be possible with css
       | tweak), it won't be obvious that there's more, and (b) how will
       | windows users scroll horizontally? With a scroll bar in the UI?
        
       | Kaze404 wrote:
       | So the author is trying to argue that on a (usually) vertical
       | rectangle screen the better option to display interactable
       | information is horizontally? I'm so confused.
        
       | jonathanlydall wrote:
       | Sometime back UberEats switched from a hamburger to a sausage
       | menu for the restaurant's menu categories and I really feel the
       | experience is worse overall for it.
       | 
       | While I suppose it's now more obvious that the categories are
       | there, it's way less usable trying to scroll left and right to
       | see them compared to before where you scrolled up and down the
       | old vertical hamburger menu.
       | 
       | On a related note, it's incredible to me that Uber never seeks
       | feedback on whether or not you think something in their app is
       | crap, they only ever ask you for feedback on riders and
       | restaurants as if they're the only aspect of the experience that
       | could possibly be poor.
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | The scrollable sausage links make it harder to skim them, and
         | make you instead read them. I think they might be doing that to
         | get you to see more of the menu and perhaps order more, which
         | makes them more money.
        
         | kingnothing wrote:
         | Uber A/B tests everything extensively before it gets rolled out
         | to everyone. They would not have switched away from the
         | hamburger menu unless it drove better metrics. I used to work
         | there.
        
           | jonathanlydall wrote:
           | I suspect that it would have been better in A/B testing as a
           | lot of people probably didn't realise the hamburger menu
           | would reveal the categories.
           | 
           | So it probably won due to discoverability rather than
           | usability.
           | 
           | So on average more people now navigate the menu, but doing so
           | is a less pleasant experience for those "in the know" before.
        
           | benatkin wrote:
           | If it's an intentional dark pattern, they may take A/B
           | testing into consideration, but still decide to make
           | usability tradeoffs.
           | 
           | https://www.darkpatterns.org/
        
         | fuzzythinker wrote:
         | Having a "..." at the end that drops down a menu panel like
         | most hamburger menu do instead of having a horizontal scroller
         | may be the best of both worlds.
        
       | eatonphil wrote:
       | I noticed this recently on the React docs site on mobile [0].
       | It's also used on Github mobile's view of repository for
       | switching between Code, Issues, Pull Requests, etc [1].
       | 
       | [0] https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation
        
       | cjlm wrote:
       | Zach Leatherman has my favorite hamburger menu implementation on
       | his homepage: https://zachleat.com
        
       | lnxg33k1 wrote:
       | I really hate those menus, didn't know their names but thank you
       | for telling me, now I can hate something by name
        
       | unethical_ban wrote:
       | It adds a scrollbar or else some kind of cue that scrolling is
       | available. Horizontal scrolling in desktop feels unnatural
       | personally. And finally, the oval links look like tags in an
       | article, not navigational controls. That last point could be
       | adjusted by squaring off the buttons, by adding a symbol between
       | links indicating a nav path, or something like that.
        
         | dumpsterdiver wrote:
         | Not to mention when using a laptop it would be easy to
         | unintentionally trigger a "navigate back or forward" browser
         | event when scrolling horizontally. Such an annoying browser
         | feature.
        
       | felix_n wrote:
       | _chef kiss_
        
       | RugnirViking wrote:
       | Perhaps a little mean, but its odd that this article about
       | website design is plaintext with maximum contrast and default
       | font, and the viewport to the code pen is so small I can't even
       | see what it's trying to show me without clicking through
        
         | _Algernon_ wrote:
         | Why would that be mean? That's great, readable design...
        
       | pupppet wrote:
       | I don't mind these on mobile. You can argue that part of the menu
       | is cropped out, but with a hamburger menu _everything_ is cropped
       | out. You can at least put the most important stuff at the
       | beginning, one less click for visitors in many cases.
        
       | css wrote:
       | Horizontal scrolling should be avoided in almost all cases.
        
         | bentcorner wrote:
         | I'm curious about why horizontal scrolling feels so bad.
         | 
         | Like it works just fine in mapping apps, which naturally align
         | to a 2d canvas, but why does it feel so lousy to use with
         | almost any other form of information?
         | 
         | Is it because we write left-to-right, top-to-bottom? So text
         | chunks fit better with no horizontal scrolling? (I think this
         | is also why vertical tabs are so much better than horizontal
         | tabs).
        
           | Izkata wrote:
           | Next time you use a mapping app and scroll with your fingers
           | or thumb, pay close attention to the direction: Most likely
           | you're actually dragging it slightly diagonally then
           | adjusting vertically afterwards.
           | 
           | I think a large part of it is that horizontal navigation as
           | in OP is too thin, so if you do these natural dragging shapes
           | your finger leaves the scrollable area. It may still work
           | fine, but it feels wrong. Vertical scrolling on the other
           | hand, because of what you say with our writing style, has a
           | much larger grab area so we can easily stay within the box.
           | 
           | There's also parts specific to it being a menu: A vertically-
           | aligned one usually has empty space on the right because the
           | menu items probably aren't the same length, giving you a nice
           | "grab area" (either your finger with touch or a place to put
           | the mouse pointer for a scrollwheel) that doesn't hide
           | anything. Plus scanning down a list is easier than sideways
           | anyway because every item starts at the same place; just
           | imagine how annoying it is to read a bulleted list on here
           | when someone accidentally puts it all on one line because
           | they didn't add an extra blank line between bullets.
        
           | seanp2k2 wrote:
           | what we need are literal site maps with (lat, lon) defined
           | for each link, so users can scroll around a fun treasure map
           | to find what they're looking for
        
           | coastflow wrote:
           | Intuitively, it might be because the mouse predates the
           | touchpad, and most mice only have vertical scroll wheels (so
           | it conditions users to avoid discovering horizontal scrolling
           | as an option, unless you click and drag a horizontal scroll
           | bar).
           | 
           | Currently, it's also rare for webpages to feature horizontal
           | scrolling, so by habit most users scroll vertically to access
           | new information.
           | 
           | Discovery is also another reason mentioned by users elsewhere
           | in these comments. Since horizontal scrolling is a rare
           | behaviour, a clear signifier [0] is needed to quickly
           | communicate that horizontal scrolling is a possibility, which
           | is an extra problem that other potential methods don't have.
           | 
           | [0] https://sites.google.com/site/thedesignofeverydaythings/h
           | ome...
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | On PCs, at least. On mobile, it's very natural.
        
           | josefresco wrote:
           | Side swiping is "normal behavior" on mobile, side _scrolling_
           | is not (on really any device)
        
           | gsich wrote:
           | No, as there is usually no proper indication that you can
           | scroll.
           | 
           | Even if, it's annoying one missclick and you might land
           | somewhere else.
        
           | wanda wrote:
           | Mobile browsers frequently come with gestures that can
           | effectively override any attempts to scroll horizontally,
           | instead taking the user backwards/forwards in browsing
           | history, for example.
           | 
           | This is certainly true of Safari, the default web browser for
           | iOS, to the point where even trying to cycle through a
           | horizontal slideshow of images can bait the user into
           | accidentally going back to the previous page.
           | 
           | Not only that, but on iOS I believe it was/is possible to
           | cycle between open apps with a very similar gesture as going
           | back/forth in browser history -- this already proved pretty
           | dumb for browser usability and would prove worse still for
           | horizontal scrolling elements on websites.
           | 
           | Personally, I like to operate my mobile device one-handed a
           | lot of the time, and at the very least I'm not scrolling
           | websites or switching back/forward with both hands even if
           | I'm holding the device with both hands.
           | 
           | So the last thing I want to do, especially if I'm carrying
           | something in one hand, is to have to try and stretch my thumb
           | to the far side of the phone to scroll through a horizontal
           | menu.
           | 
           | My other argument against this sausage menu idea, which has
           | been around far longer than the date of the linked article,
           | is that on many viewport sizes your links may not be half-
           | occluded by the edge of the screen. Given that mobile
           | browsers tend to hide their scrollbars, since without a
           | cursor the scrollbar is just a progress indicator w.r.t. how
           | far down the page you are.
           | 
           | Thus, on some screen sizes -- and it isn't difficult to
           | encounter, given how many different devices there are out
           | there -- _n_ links will be visible in full before the edge of
           | the screen, and then there may not necessarily be any visual
           | hint that there are more menu items to scroll to. So you don
           | 't discover that there are more menu items until you
           | accidentally scroll that region.
           | 
           | Finally, I would argue that even for the technophile the
           | hamburger menu is preferable at this point, simply because
           | they have been conditioned by a good decade's worth of
           | responsive web design UX. The sausage menu, being often an
           | edge case, is less obvious even to the technophile purely
           | because not many sites elected to do it that way.
           | 
           | * * *
           | 
           | It seems to me that the superior alternative to both
           | hamburger and sausage menus would be to adopt the hamburger
           | menu style, but simply replace &equiv; or the menu icon with
           | the word "Menu"
           | 
           | The hamburger style can be done without JS too. If you really
           | want to avoid JS, just use :target selector or other CSS
           | shenanigans.
        
             | lrdd wrote:
             | See https://jenne.uk as an example
        
           | jfoster wrote:
           | And one advantage of short or medium length sausage menus on
           | PCs is that they probably don't require any scrolling.
           | 
           | In my opinion, that's what's so nice about them; natural to
           | scroll on mobile, and probably not requiring any scrolling on
           | PCs.
           | 
           | If the items don't entirely fit on most PC screens, then I
           | would take that as a hint that there's too many items for a
           | sausage menu to be a good solution. (subsequently reaching
           | for hamburgers, reducing the number of items, or exploring
           | other options... eg. a sausage menu could also be more than
           | one line?)
        
           | css wrote:
           | I do not agree. Content should fit the viewport.
        
             | jokethrowaway wrote:
             | This. I still don't understand why editors all have
             | horizontal wrapping disabled by default.
             | 
             | Every time I scroll horizontally I die a little.
        
           | Jaruzel wrote:
           | Unless you are left handed, in which case those 'natural'
           | swipes, become unnatural shoves.
        
       | dangus wrote:
       | Absolutely not on sausage links most of the time. I can't tell
       | you how many times I didn't realize that menus like this could be
       | scrolled.
       | 
       | Another negative not mentioned in the article: they're biased
       | toward touch and trackpad users. My browser (and probably most
       | browsers) hides the scroll bar by default, so anyone using a
       | vertical scroll wheel mouse is going to be confused and/or have
       | some kind of difficulty scrolling.
       | 
       | At first I didn't even know that the example in the article was
       | functional! I thought it was a screenshot.
       | 
       | Hamburger menus function the same for all platforms, are easy for
       | non-technical people to figure out (especially by this point),
       | they also don't _have_ to be a hamburger (they can be a word that
       | says  "Menu," or some other kind of icon like a settings gear),
       | and they can expand to a regular menu that quickly shows all
       | possible options.
       | 
       | An alternative I thought of: a grid of colorful/contrasting icons
       | with text (example: The Uber app for mobile). I think sometimes
       | you shouldn't be afraid of taking up screen real estate if your
       | app needs to have a lot of options.
        
       | grumbel wrote:
       | Isn't that just reinventing tabs or tab-like top menus that have
       | been around for decades? Works nice enough when you only have a
       | few items to deal with, but really doesn't scale to a larger
       | number of items. Horizontal scrolling might work better on mobile
       | than on desktop, but it's still not great due to the items being
       | so much wider than they are high.
        
         | thesuitonym wrote:
         | I guess you missed this bit:
         | 
         | >Better suited for small to medium menu lists compared to
         | massive sitemaps
        
       | IYasha wrote:
       | These "hambugger" symbols wouldn't look so hambuggerish (but more
       | like menu) unless someone had less maniacal affection towards
       | rounding all the corners... (typo intended) And now sausages...
       | oh no.
        
       | vincentmarle wrote:
       | I really had something else in mind when thinking about sausage
       | links
        
       | ilamont wrote:
       | _When designing medium to large sized menu navigations on the
       | mobile web the default go-to, for some time now, has been
       | hamburger menus. This isn't necessarily a bad thing_
       | 
       | Tell it to the many people who have no idea what it means on a
       | mobile device, or increasingly on desktop websites. I've said it
       | many times before, but it's worth repeating: Most people are
       | frustrated by modern information tools. According to a 2015 OECD
       | computer skills study, <6% of Americans are level 3 (highest)
       | while half have only basic skills and 20% can't use computers.
       | (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...)
       | 
       | I like the sausage link concept _because it clearly labels
       | options with text_.
        
         | dpcan wrote:
         | Well, human beings have grown quite accustomed to using symbols
         | to represent actions they need to take. In the United States, I
         | remember learning about Mr. Yuck stickers by the time I was 4,
         | or the shape and color of a stop sign, green means go, walk and
         | don't walk figures, even an exit sign always looked the same
         | even if I couldn't read.
         | 
         | The hamburger menu takes someone explaining it to you just one
         | time to know what it is every time.
        
           | at_a_remove wrote:
           | Mr. Yuck is green, Mr. Yuck is mean, Mr. Yuck also has the
           | shape of a face absolutely filled with disgust at having put
           | something terrible in his mouth. In short, Mr. Yuck
           | communicates something purely by expression rather than
           | association.
           | 
           | The hamburger menu looks like decoration, or a portion of the
           | I Ching. Nothing about three horizontal lines says "I contain
           | options for navigation."
           | 
           | Now, were six lines used, with every other line being
           | indented, and then a \ or a / here and there, it would look
           | like something folded up, and I would think, "Oh, unfold this
           | thing." But three horizontal lines just ... no, I got
           | nothin'.
        
             | gowld wrote:
             | It's an iconic representation of a list or menu. You learn
             | it once, and it works everywhere. And it fits on a small
             | screen.
        
               | josho wrote:
               | I encourage you to go watch a novice computer user. After
               | seeing them struggle I suspect you'll change your mind.
               | 
               | I personally view the hamburger menu similar to my junk
               | drawer at home. It's where the designer stuffs crap that
               | isn't very important. So, it's the last place I look for
               | when I need to get something done in an app.
        
               | Angostura wrote:
               | 'You learn it once' is doing quite a lot of work there. I
               | tend to use a hamburger labeled with 'Menu'
        
             | seanp2k2 wrote:
             | In Chrome right now, it's 3 dots aligned vertically. Not
             | much better really.
        
             | II2II wrote:
             | The other thing to note is that traffic signs are designed
             | to alert people of one particular thing and are intended to
             | be language neutral. Hamburger menus are designed to
             | conceal multiple things and the contents are usually in a
             | specific language.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | rmetzler wrote:
           | Icons don't work with on page search (e.g CTRL+F).
           | 
           | And it's hard to describe icons to someone else on the phone.
           | I'm not sure if Word is still the mess it used to be, but
           | this kind of interface design can be really hard to
           | understand and learn. Currently for me this is Blender. The
           | software is complex, the interface mirrors this, but if
           | you're new to it, this is really hard to learn.
        
             | kaba0 wrote:
             | I guess after a point it is simply inherent complexity.
             | Like, I can't even imagine a GUI that would make someone
             | seeing it for the first time know some semi-advanced
             | feature in Word.
             | 
             | First of all, the whole problem domain has to be
             | taught/discovered. And sure, people often learn by trial-
             | and-error and it makes sense to try to maximalize this sort
             | of discoverability in all software, but I would say that it
             | doesn't scale. Even with the "better" labeled menus, gimp
             | is not intuitive to say the least.
             | 
             | So perhaps the (often annoying) teach you by showing is the
             | better direction? My gripe with it is that it is often
             | applied for trivial mobile apps for things like "search by
             | using the search bar".. but I think an all-menu/all-action
             | text-based search functionality would be a must as well.
        
         | brimble wrote:
         | Firefox and Chrome have proven Apple right, in forcing a top-
         | of-screen menu bar to appear whether the application wants it
         | to or not. This was demonstrated to me recently when my parents
         | couldn't figure out how to print on Windows in Firefox (because
         | there's no standard menu on it--they know "file -> print" just
         | fine) and called me for help. After a moment of confusion on my
         | part as I remembered that FF doesn't have a normal menu
         | anymore, then a brief and totally failed effort to talk them
         | through finding the beyond-stupid, tiny, "everything" drawer
         | button, I finally just told them to press the keys for the
         | keyboard shortcut, which they won't remember and will have to
         | ask me again next time.
        
           | slowmovintarget wrote:
           | You can turn the regular menu on for them in the options.
           | (Firefox: Right-click on tool bar, choose "Menu Bar" option
           | to enable.)
        
           | ilamont wrote:
           | I suspect many people reading this HN thread also serve as
           | their family's tech support team. Every week I get calls or
           | emails from my parents requesting help figuring out something
           | that's not obvious from the UI, is accidentally triggered by
           | users, deliberately activated (by the app) during a software
           | update, or buried deep in some settings or submenu. This
           | week's selection includes:
           | 
           | - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice
           | announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents' new
           | Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it turned on,
           | but it required me visiting their home in person again to
           | turn it off)
           | 
           | - Trying to help my father disable the "get Outlook for iOS"
           | line that suddenly started to be appended to the bottom of
           | his work emails.
           | 
           | - Helping my spouse troubleshoot a Shopify app feature that
           | prevents >1 item being subtracted from inventory at a time
           | 
           | - Figuring out how to enable a social media save shared
           | photos to her phone's photo album
           | 
           | Yes, sometimes software is so complicated and feature rich
           | these items have to buried deep in the settings. But often I
           | find that the lack of obvious text labels for basic features
           | and navigation items is the problem. Hamburger menus and the
           | three dots "more actions" icon are a poor substitute for
           | clear text labels and links.
        
             | brimble wrote:
             | The thing about modern software that infuriates me the
             | most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned
             | screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices,
             | usually about some update they don't care about. They
             | opened the thing to use it, not to read your changelog or
             | marketing shit. Coupled with auto-updating, it confuses the
             | absolute hell out of them, and the way modern design (and
             | Android especially) make it hard to tell what's a button
             | and what's text, and inconsistent cutesy button labels,
             | make it even worse (it often takes them a while to figure
             | out how to make the thing they didn't ask for and never,
             | ever want go away). Google loves to do this pretty much
             | everywhere, and it's especially bad on mobile, but FF
             | desktop's post-update new-tab-to-market-at-you-about-what-
             | changed (nothing important, 95%+ of the time) is almost as
             | bad.
             | 
             | Hell, I don't like that stuff either (does _anyone_?) but
             | it 's just a minor annoyance for me. For them it can mean
             | they give up trying to do whatever they wanted to do.
        
               | ryandrake wrote:
               | > The thing about modern software that infuriates me the
               | most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the
               | damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch
               | notices, usually about some update they don't care about.
               | 
               | I would bet in almost all cases, these can be directly
               | attributed to the developer company's poorly devised
               | career incentives. Behind every full-screen "OMG CHECK
               | OUT WHAT'S NEW" takeover or notification-spam lies a
               | product manager or engineering manager whose bonus is
               | tied to some vanity measurement of how many users are
               | _engaging_ with the new feature they launched.  "How much
               | of the user's attention and screen space can I take over
               | in order to try to jam this unwanted feature down their
               | throat and show huge usage numbers next performance
               | review?"
        
             | flutas wrote:
             | > - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice
             | announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents'
             | new Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it
             | turned on, but it required me visiting their home in person
             | again to turn it off)
             | 
             | For this one, I don't think it's a software update but
             | rather user error (though it's not clear even to me how).
             | 
             | I myself have accidentally enabled it, there seems to be
             | some combination of buttons on the remote that will enable
             | it. Still not sure on the specific combo though.
        
           | rustyminnow wrote:
           | I know this is besides your point, but in Firefox there is an
           | option to turn the menu bar back on (at least until they
           | remove the option :/).
           | 
           | If you go to the "Customize Toolbar" page, on the bottom left
           | where it says "Toolbars v" you can check "[ ] Menu Bar". Hope
           | that helps (a little)!
        
             | qwertox wrote:
             | Or right-click on any free space on the top row. There's an
             | option in the menu.
        
               | rustyminnow wrote:
               | Oh you are right! That's how I was getting to the
               | Customize Toolbar page too haha. Totally missed that!
        
               | anon_123g987 wrote:
               | Or press the Alt button to show the Menu bar temporarily.
        
             | brimble wrote:
             | It'd occurred to me there was probably a setting to fix it,
             | but I've forgotten to check the last couple times I've been
             | over, because I'm a bad son :-( Thanks for confirming my
             | suspicion, will try to remember to change that setting for
             | them next time.
        
               | unethical_ban wrote:
               | You can also tap "alt" to make it appear, I believe, if
               | it isn't enabled.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | That's anecdotal, but my mother who "grew up" on DOS and
           | Windows was never able to grasp the relationship between the
           | top menu bar and the application window on MacOS. I bought
           | her a Mac in 2010 because they are supposedly more intuitive
           | and I didn't want to provide PC support anymore, but it was
           | no better than Windows for her at all (also not worse overall
           | I guess).
        
             | seanp2k2 wrote:
             | The first time I discovered that "dragging an icon to the
             | trash" was one of the few ways to uninstall an application
             | on Mac, my mind was a bit blown. I was struggling so hard
             | to find an "Add/remove programs" equivalent or an
             | uninstaller.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | I believe it's because that literally just deletes the
               | application file/directory, there's no hook for
               | application-specific uninstall routines.
        
               | not2b wrote:
               | Remember when the way to eject a floppy or other
               | removable disk on a Mac was to drag its icon to the
               | trash? That was weird.
        
             | stouset wrote:
             | Another anecdote, my mom was essentially a lifelong Windows
             | user. I would have to answer basic tech support questions
             | for her several times a month.
             | 
             | She's switched 80% of her use to an iPad and the rest to a
             | Mac laptop, and I get a question about once a year.
             | 
             | YMMV.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | I ended up switching my parents to iPads as well, which
               | was a huge improvement.
        
             | brimble wrote:
             | I spent years thinking they [EDIT: Apple's always-top-of-
             | screen application menus, that is] were dumb for that
             | reason. It never occurred to me that major software vendors
             | would be stupid and/or user-hating enough to ditch the
             | standard top menu, when they have a whole bunch of stuff
             | that _should_ go in it.
        
               | felix318 wrote:
               | I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying the reason the menu is
               | at the top of the screen is that it's easier to hit it
               | with the mouse, you just push it all the way up. I think
               | it's a valid point.
        
               | dec0dedab0de wrote:
               | I have had my second monitor on top of my main one for
               | the last 20 years, when I switched to a Mac this was the
               | hardest thing to get used to.
        
               | roughly wrote:
               | Apple's HIG used to have a bunch of these nuggets -
               | things about predictability of where inputs are, what was
               | clickable, etc. Not sure how much has been preserved over
               | the years, but the original docs are pretty legendary.
        
               | brimble wrote:
               | I've noticed it's really nice if you like quarter- and
               | half-screen layouts (or anything else that's sorta
               | tiling-like). Four different programs on the screen, only
               | one "file, edit, ..." menubar eating space.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | The top menu made sense when computer screens were small
               | and the mouse pointer thus never far away from the top,
               | and applications were fullscreen most of the time anyway.
        
               | ziml77 wrote:
               | To me it seems the top menu bar is a holdover from early
               | Mac OS. I saw a demo of one of the early versions of the
               | OS, and it made a ton of sense there. The OS could only
               | run a single application at a time, but that application
               | could have multiple windows. From that perspective it's
               | very sensible that whichever application had full control
               | over the screen would want a menu bar global to its own
               | windows.
               | 
               | Now though, it's just weird to have the menu bar at the
               | top of the screen. And it's especially strange when
               | there's no windows for the application left but the menu
               | bar for it is still visible (something that wouldn't be
               | strange in the single app at a time model)
        
           | babypuncher wrote:
           | The way Apple does it is also better design than a
           | conventional menu bar.
           | 
           | I can see why FF and Chrome hide it by default. Most of the
           | actions tucked away in it are either used infrequently, or
           | have common keyboard shortcuts. Turning it on in Firefox
           | makes the chrome feel cluttered to me.
           | 
           | By exporting the application's menu bar to an OS-provided
           | panel that includes other OS-provided functions (clock,
           | status indicators, wireless controls), they enforce both a
           | strong level of consistency while allowing for reduced window
           | clutter.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | JadedBlueEyes wrote:
           | On Windows, and most Linux apps, pressing Alt reveals a menu
           | similar to MacOS's global menu. It's basically impossibe to
           | discover, but it's there!
        
             | brimble wrote:
             | I knew that from long long ago adventures in mouseless
             | Windows-using, for focusing it, but not for causing it to
             | appear if there isn't one. Thanks.
        
           | thevoiceless wrote:
           | In case it's helpful: You can also tell them to right-click
           | anywhere in the main toolbar area aside from the URL field,
           | select "Customize Toolbar...", and then drag the "Print"
           | button to wherever they want it. Alternatively: Hamburger
           | menu > More tools > Customize toolbar...
        
         | fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
         | I'm curious if words do better if you test people who don't
         | know the language.
        
         | abortionlover69 wrote:
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | The problem isn't the mechanics of the hamburger menu, it's
         | that we use an icon to represent it. I've never seen a case
         | where space was so scarce that the icon couldn't be replaced by
         | the word "Menu."
         | 
         | Perhaps there is some issue with internationalization, but I've
         | been to restaurants in 30+ countries, and "Menu" seems to be
         | pretty universally-used word.
        
         | at-fates-hands wrote:
         | I can give you some anecdotal evidence that supports what
         | you're saying.
         | 
         | The very large health care company I work for now is currently
         | redesigning their global nav. We've had no less than 10-15
         | design working sessions. The same thing that continually comes
         | up is the hamburger menu and how to handle it.
         | 
         | The reason is the company did some pretty extensive research
         | with seniors (a big chunk of our clientele) and found many
         | don't have any idea the hamburger menu is a standard menu now
         | for both desktop and mobile apps. We were told we either have
         | to use it minimally, or not at all. Its been a struggle to find
         | something that everybody can agree on. We have a very small
         | team of 5 people - 2 designers, 2 devs and myself
         | (accessibility) working on this.
         | 
         | I also happen to work in accessibility which many of the
         | apps/sites that use hamburger menus on mobile either create
         | keyboard traps or are totally unusable for screen readers. I'm
         | at least happy our company is trying to move to something
         | different.
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | > I like the sausage link concept because it clearly labels
         | options with text.
         | 
         | 100%. I'm kinda surprised how the 3 lines hamburger menu got so
         | prevalent in the first place, because it _always_ user tests
         | poorly. My guess is that when flat minimalism (my favorite
         | shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to
         | know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to
         | mean) was the rage, even though user testing always showed a
         | ton of people didn 't know what the three lines meant, that
         | designers felt it would eventually become "the standard" and
         | people would know.
         | 
         | Problem is, years later, tons of people _still_ don 't know
         | what it means - every time we do user testing, words do better.
         | I think these days design fads change so frequently that there
         | really isn't enough time for any design to be that "standard"
         | long enough for everyone to really grasp it.
        
           | ridgered4 wrote:
           | But seriously, what does the hamburger icon mean?
        
             | jayd16 wrote:
             | It's three lines. A minimalist list.
        
           | politelemon wrote:
           | Not quite, the usage of lines are still conveying something,
           | it's similar to pause, play, stop on media players, it's
           | similar to back, forward and refresh icons on the browser.
           | Line based symbols are easy to pick up and have been picked
           | up by users from our testing, I'm really not sure what
           | studies you're referring to (?)
           | 
           | For an actual shitty example, look at Macos window button
           | controls. Red yellow and green circles, they convey
           | absolutely nothing, you're expected to learn them. Instead of
           | slating this shitty design, everyone just rolls over and
           | learns them.
        
             | dkonofalski wrote:
             | I think you're either unaware or ignoring that, in both of
             | those cases, there was precedent that people were already
             | familiar with when those icons came out. Pause, play, and
             | stop, for example, were found on nearly any
             | media/cassette/tape player and served as simple indicators
             | of the direction the tape/spool was going. The arrow to
             | left meant the reel was spinning backwards because the tape
             | moved to the left, the square meant stop because the reel
             | didn't move at all, and the play icon meant that the reel
             | was moving to the right. Add in double arrows to denote
             | speed. Add a line at the far left/far right to indicate
             | beginning/end.
             | 
             | The hamburger has no such lineage. It started as a menu
             | icon and changed slightly but no one had any idea what even
             | the initial icon meant without an explanation that it's a
             | list.
        
               | underwater wrote:
               | The hamburger menu represents a list of items. It's
               | symbolic, but at least a direct representation of the
               | outcome the user wants.
               | 
               | The play and stop icons were icons that describe an
               | operation of a machine that will then indirectly produce
               | the outcome the user wants. They require the user to know
               | how the machine functions. No one thinks "I would like
               | the tape to move to the right" or "I would like the music
               | to stop, which means the tape needs to stop moving, which
               | means stopping the spools, which means selecting the
               | least circular shape".
        
           | Izkata wrote:
           | The original symbol represented a menu that pops up from the
           | bottom of the screen, as they worked in the early Android
           | versions: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/06c3657d29dbfaf9c
           | c921d2690...
           | 
           | The three-lines version was an evolution of that, just
           | chopping off the sides to go extra minimal, and happened very
           | quickly.
           | 
           | And nowadays we have an even more minimal one, shortening the
           | three lines to three dots.
        
             | TuringTest wrote:
             | At least the three dots look like the ellipsis, which has a
             | standard meaning of "there's even more..."
             | 
             | At the end of a list of other menu entries, there's a
             | chance that it can be inferred to mean "let's me see some
             | more".
        
             | slowmovintarget wrote:
             | Kebob menu isn't much better than the hamburger menu. Why
             | are all these web affordances named after food? I'm hungry
             | now.
        
           | gary_0 wrote:
           | > flat minimalism
           | 
           | "Modern" design is so opposed to any skeuomorphism that every
           | item on the screen has been totally drained of color and
           | detail. So many UIs are frustrating to use because everything
           | is an abstract monochrome glyph. The extreme of fashion over
           | function we're suffering right now is mind-boggling.
           | 
           | In the early 2000's we had books like Steve Krug's "Don't
           | Make Me Think"; but now, for some reason, decades of design
           | and engineering knowledge are being totally ignored, to
           | society's great detriment.
        
             | pmontra wrote:
             | I wonder if those books are ever read nowadays or if the
             | sheer number of projects requiring design skills led to
             | uneducated masses of coders or whatever (me too) doing the
             | job of real educated designers. And fashion, and Bootstrap
             | and all those time saving toolkits.
        
           | jayd16 wrote:
           | Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep
           | anything they haven't considered under the rug. They're
           | simple so no one attempts to cram in carousels or videos or
           | what have you, so its the easiest way to add functionality
           | into an app that doesn't have any other thought put into
           | expanding the navigation. So in that sense they're highly
           | productive.
        
             | tshaddox wrote:
             | > Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep
             | anything they haven't considered under the rug.
             | 
             | Aren't you just describing all collapsible menus? I thought
             | the complaint about the hamburger menu was specifically
             | that the icon is unclear. It seems odd to disparage all
             | collapsible menus, particularly on mobile where it's very
             | easy to have a small number of reasonable menu options with
             | no way to possible fit them onto the screen without a way
             | to collapse them.
        
               | johannes1234321 wrote:
               | Other collapsible menus need a name of some sort and then
               | can only take things /somewhat/ related to that name. The
               | "Hamburger" can take anything.
        
             | kitsunesoba wrote:
             | This is one of the things I dislike most about hamburger
             | menus: they're effectively junk drawers than can contain
             | anything and everything and are painful to try to search
             | through.
             | 
             | Just about every prior type of navigation is better.
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | The hamburger menu on the web is what the touch screen are
           | for cars. You can fit anything on there, no matter what the
           | future might hold. No need to think about your content too
           | hard.
           | 
           | And in fact the designer is really not supposed to think
           | about the content too hard. It's not how we do web. This is
           | how we do: There's a CMS and you can add and remove items.
           | How many? As many as the client later discovers they want.
           | 
           | It makes sense, kinda. It solves issues for different parties
           | that are involved in the process. Like with touch screens in
           | cars, we get something for what we give and it might just be
           | the best we can reasonably do given constraints.
           | 
           | It's just not that great.
        
           | Jiro wrote:
           | Flat minimalism (compared to using words) is popular because
           | you don't need to have translations of square, circle, and
           | triangle into foreign languages.
           | 
           | (Square, circle, and triangle is also the old Electronic Arts
           | logo, but that's probably not the reason.)
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | > Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know
           | what it means
           | 
           | This is a problem which could get solved if every mainstream
           | media presents this icon for 30 seconds with a short
           | explanation for one week during the main news hour. Or every
           | newspaper would dedicate 1/4 of a page to it for one week.
           | 
           | Viewers educated, problem solved. Make an exception for such
           | an important icon.
           | 
           | I personally find the sausage link horrible. I have to scroll
           | by picking the scroll bar with the mouse because the scroll
           | wheel is not working in the demo, and it's anything but a
           | compact display of information, unlike what you get with a
           | drop-down popup menu.
        
           | the_pwner224 wrote:
           | > my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected
           | everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are
           | supposed to mean
           | 
           | What is this referring to?
           | 
           | Edit: I'm so used to these buttons that I didn't even realize
           | they were just simple flat shapes. It definitely would be
           | confusing for someone new to Android or for someone who's not
           | good with tech.
        
             | throwawayben wrote:
             | The soft buttons on Android:
             | https://i.stack.imgur.com/YKCPp.png
        
             | qwertox wrote:
             | I believe the navigation buttons on the bottom. I see no
             | issue with them, since it's easy to associate the left
             | triangle with back, the circle with something that affects
             | everything and the square with something else which does
             | something which is obvious once you tap it.
        
             | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
             | In Android[0], the "back" button on the bottom is a
             | triangle pointing left. The "home" button is a circle. The
             | "show recent apps" button is a square. All are just flat
             | shapes.
             | 
             | Completely unintuitive to anybody that's never used Android
             | before.
             | 
             | Contrast that to the early days of Android where the Back
             | button was a curved arrow, the Home button was an icon of a
             | house, and the Menu button was the hamburger menu people
             | are familiar with, except the lines were thinner.
             | 
             | [0] This may actually vary depending on what phone you have
             | and if the maker changes these, but on my Pixel 6, this is
             | the description.
        
               | kozd wrote:
               | Back symbol pointing left is probably less intuitive if
               | your language isn't left to right oriented. Wonder if
               | back symbols or back animations have ever been
               | "localized" to orient based on the language used.
        
               | ryanbrunner wrote:
               | Android sort of gets a pass in that it's something that's
               | constantly used by the user, so there's some ability to
               | train people into arbitrary and unclear UXes, especially
               | if they're only a few buttons (a good example is game
               | controllers where what buttons do is completely
               | disconnected from the letter or symbol they're assigned).
               | 
               | iOS is pretty similar in that a good number of the
               | navigation gestures aren't super intuitive and not really
               | discoverable until you build some muscle memory.
        
       | ggambetta wrote:
       | I can confirm that the Meatverse [0] will be built on these UX
       | primitives.
       | 
       | [0] http://meatver.se
        
       | flak48 wrote:
       | Better known as pill navigation
        
         | karaterobot wrote:
         | I think of pill navigation as connected, like: (___|____|___)
         | 
         | These remind me of what Material Design called Chips.
        
           | krossitalk wrote:
           | Yes, these are Chips exactly (especially when scrolled
           | horizontally, ala YouTube mobile Home page).
           | https://material.io/components/chips
        
       | dpcan wrote:
       | I think this would be a problem in terms of accessibility.
       | 
       | Gestures are required, text disappears horizontally, no visual
       | indicator that you may have to scroll horizontally... I don't
       | know, maybe I'm wrong, but I've also been a fan of the hamburger
       | menu since it arrived.
        
         | oh_boy wrote:
         | This isn't less accessible than a hamburger menu. Even the
         | opposite might be the case as defacto most hamburger menus are
         | implemented without proper focus handing or correct aria
         | attributes for announcing open/closed states.
         | 
         | With the sausage menu, at least as screenreader user, you will
         | have less issues as you can tab through a list of links
         | immediately without the need to open a broken menu . Also
         | scroll position is adjusted by the browser automatically to the
         | element in focus, so it isn't even a problem for keyboard users
         | with eyesight.
        
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