[HN Gopher] The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
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The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
Author : thm
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-06-17 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nngroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nngroup.com)
| josefrichter wrote:
| I always said Hamburger is an excuse for a lazy designer :-) Take
| it with a pinch of salt.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I always use em because I'm the laziest type of designer: a dev
| bandoti wrote:
| The hamburger menu is a pet peeve of mine! It takes much less
| cognitive load to simply read the word "menu".
|
| Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as
| wide but now there's no longer any reason to use it the way it
| is.
|
| Perhaps it is permissible on a busy UI with many buttons, but
| that job was taken by the ellipses, which also takes less
| cognitive burden!
| JohnFen wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. The hamburger menu is in my list of the
| worst UI elements around. It has nothing good to recommend it.
|
| It's barely tolerable in situations where screen space is at a
| premium, but it's still pretty awful.
|
| > Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through
| repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the
| icon with increasing confidence.
|
| Sure: it's the symbol of the "junk drawer" of the UI. Who knows
| what random assortment lurks in there? It's a place you go only
| as a last resort.
| bilekas wrote:
| I'm curious, not a UI designer at all here, but what's so
| taxing about the hamburger? I grew up with it mostly always
| around and never even thought twice about it..
| bandoti wrote:
| Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When
| compared to language which we've spent our entire lives
| decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden
| is much higher.
|
| In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as
| you can get, so it doesn't capture the eye well to begin
| with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually
| complexity.
|
| But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea--language
| is the ultimate "codec" of human communication.
| baseballdork wrote:
| Isn't text a "symbolic visual"? I would think that at some
| point a symbol that's used as frequently as the hamburger
| icon would/could eventually become equivalent to the word.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually
| complexity.
|
| Written words have a "voice" - that part of your mind
| that recognizes something spoken. Hamburger menu icons
| don't have that, nor do they have the higher contrast or
| complexity that emoji have.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The implication of "load" is not that it's a huge hurdle, but
| just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to
| visually assess what it means. Add up all those little
| delays, and you have a frustrated new user.
|
| I regularly use a piece of software from IBM that has (this
| won't surprise you) an awful UI. There are not one but TWO
| hamburger menus, hidden amongst a bunch of text menu
| headings, and figuring out where the one you want is can be
| noticeably taxing. Explaining to another user where to click
| is even worse - "No, not that one, the one under the... to
| the right..."
| Izkata wrote:
| > but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most
| users to visually assess what it means
|
| Also as an example, three horizontal lines also sometimes
| get used as grips to indicate an element can be click-
| dragged around. It is less common than it used to be,
| though.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My problem with it mostly that it hides functionality. Seeing
| a hamburger menu gives you no insight as to what options
| exist under it.
|
| The menu itself also tends to be a "grab bag" of multiple
| otherwise unconnected things, increasing the effort required
| to figure out how to do something.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I like to refer to them as junk drawers due to their messy
| nature.
|
| Apps with hamburger menus also tend to have navigation
| that's otherwise not well though out, think burying options
| in chains of modals where the paths to those options change
| whenever the app's dev decides it wants to push a different
| feature/metric.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I like the "junk drawer" analogy. It's perfect. IMO if
| you as an app developer find yourself reaching for a
| hamburger menu, that's the time to step back and stop
| adding junk features, especially if you're writing a
| mobile app or web page. If you can't fit your
| application's critical functionality in, say, 4 tabs
| across the bottom of the app, the app is probably trying
| to do too much.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That's often the case, but the other common problem is
| lack of consideration about hierarchy. It's fine if every
| function of the app isn't accessible with a single tap --
| that's probably not necessary except for the app's most
| pivotal functions, but most things should be able to be
| used within two taps and almost everything within three,
| with the paths being logical and predictable.
|
| It's plenty doable, but like I said it takes some sitting
| down and planning and perhaps more importantly, design
| centered around the user and their needs and less around
| looking pretty in a slideshow or trying herd the user
| around.
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| I know it's only anecdotal, but my mom doesn't get it. She's
| not super interested in her iPad and basically only uses it
| when she has to or for FaceTime. She'd be the perfect test
| subject for stress testing UIs and more interfaces than you'd
| think are doing a pretty poor job of explaining themselves.
| Not many icons are intuitive, hiding something in modal
| windows, muscle memory/dexterity and precision are all
| problem areas.
|
| The hamburger is basically all of that rolled into one
| button. It's pretty abstract, you never know what's behind it
| and when they get fancy with animations and swipe gestures,
| it's almost always a failure.
|
| I know it's a convenient way to clean up a screen, but the
| content in that menu needs to be absolutely optional for it
| to work.
| myself248 wrote:
| Because when I eat a hamburger, there isn't a whole
| restaurant inside it.
|
| Nothing about the food suggests its function. And the
| function varies, it might be a whole rabbit-warren of menus
| and options. It might be a bunch of actions. It might just be
| one last item that wouldn't fit on the screen. It's an awful
| graphic for an awful concept. "We ran out of UI ideas so we
| just shoveled what was left into this junk drawer" is no way
| to go through life.
| msgodel wrote:
| Even the palm pilot with its ridiculously tiny screen and bad
| touch ditigizer managed CUA-style menus.
|
| Mobile UI design isn't about making things more understandable,
| it's about getting the user into a helpless and suggestible
| state so your ad impressions are worth more.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| More than anything hamburger menu type design feels to me
| like an "avoid effort and skill as much as possible" sort of
| thing more than it does an "optimize ad revenue" sort of
| thing, as does flat design. It's about lowering the bar for
| what's acceptable to ship as far as you can possibly get away
| with. Plaster some scrolling flat rounded rectangles and a
| hamburger menu on the screen and boom you've got an app.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Don't make me think? Don't let me think!
| xnx wrote:
| I had to look up "CUA".
|
| Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces
| developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating
| systems and computer programs.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I think it's time to let this pet peeve go. :(
|
| It wouldn't be fair to use "MENU", as not everyone speaks
| English, and regardless, many UIs aesthetically need an icon,
| so why not have standardized on one?
|
| It's healthy to have decided on an icon, but I agree an
| ellipsis would've been (and still would be) intuitive too.
| Maybe designers trying to make their mark will start using
| ellipses in new designs... who knows.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't
| make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the
| disorganization.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| If the designer wants to encourage super-users and quicker
| access then splaying out all options is better. If they
| want "clean and tidy", the icon is better.
|
| Heck, even when I have splayed out all the most-important
| options across the screen... where do I put the /rest/ of
| the menu options? in an "other" menu, likely drawn with 3
| horizontal lines.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| You're assuming that it's an agreed and understood standard,
| which it really isn't. Tech savvy audiences often don't find
| it easy to understand that there are lots of people who don't
| understand things like this.
|
| In terms of using MENU, if your audience is not English
| speaking then you can, and should, consider adding
| internationalisation and localisation as an alternative. If
| you have considered it for your content, it makes sense to
| consider it for your UI as well.
| etblg wrote:
| Judging from the list of languages that have "menu" as a word
| (with a comparable definition to "menu"), I don't think it's
| a stretch for people to know what the word "menu" means:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menu , it's not even
| originally an English word afterall.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| No sorry - an ellipsis is the meatballs menu, not a
| hamburger. Different things. There's also the kebab menu
| (also a different thing) and the fighting corn dogs menu ...
| bandoti wrote:
| This is too much for me now haha.
|
| A restaurant menu contains hamburgers, hotdogs, meatballs.
| A UI menu is represented by abstract icons of the items
| contained within a restaurant menu.
|
| Now I am starting to like the hamburger menu after all...
| perhaps more as satire though. :)
|
| For what it's worth, ellipsis is the best of the bunch,
| because it means the same thing as in the written language,
| and is concise enough to use as a button that suggests what
| the action does.
| tshaddox wrote:
| And for restaurant websites, "Menu" is often one of the links
| inside the menu, so that's certainly confusing.
| throwaway843 wrote:
| I'm curious what's cognitively loading about three horizontal
| bars arranged in a square located in the corner of an app or
| website.
|
| Screens, somewhat counterintuitively, used to be wider. Because
| they were not on handheld mobile devices. Then we had the
| menubar and nested dropdowns, suckerfish, etc. It was an
| exciting time to see a menu, you were never quite sure what you
| were going to get - I believe there are positives to learning
| curves for power users.
|
| But I digress. San means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take
| cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.
| bandoti wrote:
| Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words:
|
| Menu Settings Notepad
|
| If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and
| decoded by viewers.
|
| Three bars means what, exactly? There's the cognitive load.
| xnx wrote:
| > Three bars means what, exactly? There's the cognitive
| load.
|
| This was true early on when it was not a common convention,
| or only used in mobile apps. Now, it is nearly universal,
| though still not nearly standard enough in placement or
| presentation.
|
| If we were to redo history, it would've been great to see
| an expanding menu closely positioned by a top-left logo.
| Sort of like a Windows Start Menu for each website.
| bandoti wrote:
| I understand and agree to an extent with common use.
|
| However, it stands that language is more specific and
| unambiguous--thus better suited to communicate an action.
|
| There's also the problem of the plethora of OTHER icons
| which use horizontal bars to cause even more cognitive
| load.
|
| And then, there are many people who have not learned
| hamburger menu since childhood, and thus the burden is
| even greater!
| throwaway843 wrote:
| Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and
| thousands of times it's been seen before.
|
| People have no inate understanding of 'menu'. We don't even
| read short words like that letter by letter, it's read as a
| block and is far more complex than three bars.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I've seen too many variants of icons for "general" menu.
| Three bars, three dots, square, square in square, tall
| rectangle, gear, company logo and probably a few more.
|
| And if we want to focus on just three bars let's not
| leave out the skeuomorphism trend where three bars meant
| the "grip" area, something to use to rearrange items or
| windows.
| bandoti wrote:
| Well, actually the three bars are now two: the cool kids
| have replaced hamburger with a sausage roll.
|
| See https://apple.com
| reaperducer wrote:
| For continuity, maybe we should call it the "hot dog"
| menu.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands
| and thousands of times it 's been seen before._
|
| This is true. It means "exactly the same" where it was
| used millions of times before it landed on a computer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bar
| 6510 wrote:
| I use to know a gamer who used a phone for something like a
| decade. He got stuck doing something and I had to point out
| the burger to him. The thing he was looking for was
| interestingly enough not there. Apparently all websites he
| used were perfectly usable without knowing the button exists.
|
| In contrast, some people can't not-read something and it
| being a button is automatically parsed out. Symbols and icons
| have to be learned which is a more gradual process. The other
| day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.
| v5v3 wrote:
| "Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near
| as wide but now there's no longer any reason to use it the way
| it is."
|
| Mobile users?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There is more than enough room for 4 menus across the top of
| a typical mobile device. If you expect the user to need to
| access it regularly, you could even put it across the bottom.
| This is why the homescreen on most phones has 4 items across
| the bottom; not a single hamburger menu with "Phone,
| Messages, Web, ..."
| v5v3 wrote:
| The article says 'positon the Hamburger in the top left corner',
| but many sites have it in top right too.
| deepvibrations wrote:
| Yeah, I assumed the standard was actually top-right...
|
| I'd be interested in people's thoughts about which side is
| best, or if it just doesn't matter.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't think it matters which side. What matters more is
| that everyone does it the same. Most times, I see it on the
| right.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You're never going to get app developers to independently
| agree on one consistent way to do anything. In fact, many
| of them will deliberately do the opposite of what everyone
| else does, for nebulous "brand differentiation" reasons.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Most of us Westerners read left-to-right, while being right-
| handed.
|
| Thus:
|
| "Where should I go?" is answered quickly in the top-left.
|
| Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires top-
| right.
|
| Just depends on your priorities.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires
| top-right.
|
| Surely bottom-right?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Putting anything but your page content for me to drag to
| scroll in the bottom half, right third of a mobile site
| is a capital offense, IMO.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I think of its default as "top left". But "top right" is
| frequent.
|
| "Not quite top, mostly right" is where IBM puts their SECOND
| hamburger icon on DNG software. May they rot in eternity...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My I present GNOME:
|
| https://woltman.com/media/posts/244/gr-menus-moving-around-3...
|
| Because having a full menu bar at the top made it too easy to
| find options.
| streptomycin wrote:
| A full menu bar would take up too much space, then they
| wouldn't have room to put huge amounts of padding everywhere.
| martin_a wrote:
| The article is wrong on that. Top left is "reserved" for the
| logo, top right for a menu. That's learned behaviour all across
| the "left to right" world.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| A good compromise would be to place it in the middle. That way
| everybody is equally unhappy
| pier25 wrote:
| Most people use their right hand to interact with a mobile
| phone so it makes more sense to put it on the right side.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's great, because the "move this panel" symbol, that is
| composed by a set of horizontal lines, is usually on the top-
| right too.
| samwhiteUK wrote:
| That Newsweek one would have had me stumped for a little, I
| think. I like to think I'm pretty tech-savvy, but not knowing
| Newsweek, that looks a little bit like a logo to me. I think I
| would assume that was going to take me to the homepage and avoid
| it.
| strict9 wrote:
| Around 10 years ago I thought they were a terrible practice. A
| win for graphic designers that wanted simple and nice looking at
| the expense of usability.
|
| But over time people learn and its standard. And as the NN group
| article points out: it has become familiar and known today.
|
| My favorite iteration of this was in the This American Life
| mobile app that used a graphic of an actual hamburger instead of
| 3 stacked gray lines. This was also about 10 years ago I believe.
| Unfortunately I can't find any reference or graphic depicting it.
| josefrichter wrote:
| People get used to everything. Including war. Just because they
| learn how to pull through, does not mean it's any good.
| savanaly wrote:
| But the designs literally go from bad to good once people
| know how to use them. Unlike war, which is bad whether people
| are used to it or not. If you're insisting the hamburger
| design is bad for some other reason rather than people not
| knowing how to use it, it's the same mistake the designers
| made in the first place when they insisted it was good
| despite people not knowing how to use it.
| torstenvl wrote:
| False
| nancyminusone wrote:
| It's been 10 years and my parents are still clueless
|
| "What is that? Why don't they put 'menu' there?"
|
| I don't know dad, I'm not the one who made it
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Can you please let them know to change it? Someone should
| tell them
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Text labels add SO much in terms of usability. I don't know
| why we got away from them. I guess they don't look as pretty.
| card_zero wrote:
| Not an option, because it makes it harder work to sell a
| product to the Chinese.
| kevindamm wrote:
| the RTL languages are also a pain point, and even German
| can make your UI designing difficult for length of words.
| Really, the high variability of width for i18n'ed words
| in general is I think where the icon-heavy approach
| originated.
| robocat wrote:
| I was using a cheap device the other day and it had:
|
| [<] [xxx] [>]
|
| Left button was UP and right button was DOWN (numbers
| e.g. temperature).
|
| Is there any reason that < would be UP in Chinese?
| ericmcer wrote:
| The brain is better with images once it has been trained to
| recognize them. Just sucks for the people that never got
| the training.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| The problem is not only do all text labels have different
| sizes in one language, they also have completely different
| unrelated sizes in other languages.
|
| Standardized icons can be laid out easily regardless of
| language
| foresto wrote:
| I hope your parents never have to deal with European
| appliances, the controls of which are often labeled with
| mysterious icons instead of words.
| stanac wrote:
| Easy i18n? They don't have to translate the UI to 30+
| languages.
| pharrington wrote:
| Hamburger is pretty bad, but we adjust if the pattern is repeated
| enough.
|
| Which means we can also adjust to a waaaay better alternative to
| the hamburger menu (but i dont know what that is rn).
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The article points out the solution: the word "MENU".
| pharrington wrote:
| Absolutely just use the word "MENU" instead, if the button's
| already in a textual interface. And if not, labeling the
| hamburger is almost always better than leaving it naked. But
| I think there are better overall solutions to be found
| outside of the local maximum, if you will.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate
| that to every language we need to support? Do we scale the UI
| to work for the different length words?
|
| I dont think that is any better at all. If anything I think
| its solidly worse.
| josefx wrote:
| Menu seems to be the kind of word that pops up in a lot of
| languages.
| qualeed wrote:
| Some with extra letters, or accents, or fonts entirely.
| Other languages share the concept but the word is
| completely different.
|
| menou, valikko, roghchlar, meniyu , minw, meniu, trinh
| don
|
| To pick a few.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So translate it. Unless your app is so simple that it has
| no other text labels anywhere, you're going to need to
| need translations anyway.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Ideally, the translation needs to happen before the UI
| design. I've seen a lot of UI designs come straight from
| the designer with a beautiful pixel-perfect depiction of
| controls, but assuming English. So the "MENU" button was
| designed deliberately such that exactly four latin
| characters fit inside of it horizontally. Or assuming
| people's names fit in one line of text, or addresses have
| a certain number of lines and so on. Then when you get
| around to translating everything, the design has to go
| back to the drawing board.
| SirFatty wrote:
| I assumed that hamburger description was after-the-fact, not the
| original designation. It always felt that way to me.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think the graphic itself was intended to represent a menu: a
| list of items.
| Izkata wrote:
| It was, it's a simplified version of the original that included
| the border around the lines, similar to one of the examples in
| the article (imagine a physical restaurant menu). Along the
| same lines, the three lines have since been further simplified
| into three dots in a lot of places - no longer looking
| hamburger-like.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| > three dots
|
| The kebab
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| It's just difficult to describe, so instead of "click on the
| three horizontal lines thing" it's easier to say "hit the
| hamburger" and the name stuck. I guess if they were going to
| just have an abstract meaningless icon they should have picked
| something easier to describe over the phone, for example.
| xnx wrote:
| Great work by NN/group documenting examples in the wild and
| providing clear suggestions.
|
| It's amazing just how bad UI/UX professionals are (often due to
| backgrounds in graphic design instead of human computer
| interaction). Making changes as small as putting an outline
| around the hamburger menu (makes it looks like a document) or
| putting dots in front of the lines (makes it look like a button
| to add bullets) makes the icon unrecognizable/confusing.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| Why not just recreate the [original
| experiment](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/)
| rather than citing a book that uses different methodology?
|
| Given the original study shows quite comprehensively how bad a
| design pattern it is, it would be far more interesting to see
| that research repeated rather than a test on hamburger
| variations.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Text requires effort to translate, and might not fit well for
| some languages and some UIs. So managers don't want to pay for
| translations & thus want only icons, and designers don't want to
| make UIs that work for wildly different label widths. This is not
| unique to hamburger menus, but it does mean that "just replace it
| with the word 'Menu'" will be rejected.
|
| Hamburger menus are annoying because they add a click. They can
| save some screen space on small devices by allowing most of the
| top area which would be covered by a menu bar to be clear, with
| only a single button in the corner. This is pretty useless on
| larger displays (laptops, desktops, etc.) but makes sense on
| phones, and sometimes on smaller tablets.
|
| Hiding options happens even with traditional menus. Do you change
| application settings under Edit->Preferences, or is it
| File->Settings, or Tools->Options, or something else? Or worse,
| do you change some things in Edit->Preferences, others in
| Tools->Options, and yet more in File->Settings?
|
| Hamburger menus aren't always bad design, but they often allow
| hiding bad design by making the UX worse. Attempting to unify UI
| across wildly different interface types (desktops, laptops,
| tablets, & phones) inevitably leads to bad design & bad UX.
| Keeping a common color scheme or overall style is fine, but the
| interaction patterns of the different input schemes (keyboard &
| mouse, keyboard & touchpad, touchscreen) are different enough
| that UIs need to vary between device types for a good UX.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Text requires effort to translate_
|
| Localization used to be a massive, expensive undertaking, but
| with all the cheap translation services we have today, I doubt
| it still is. I wonder of there will be a shift at some point,
| where more text-heavy GUIs will make a comeback if translation
| is cheap.
| officeplant wrote:
| >cheap translation services we have today
|
| Which seemingly put out cheap translations. At least in my
| experience with modern Anime/Movies/Videogames. You can
| always tell when actual human effort was put into
| localization and not just machine translation.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _with all the cheap translation services we have today, I
| doubt it still is_
|
| My company employs a number of full-time translators, some of
| whom do translations for my web site.
|
| When I talk with them, they all say that computer
| translations, while improving, are still terrible. They spend
| a lot of time fixing Google translations that make it into
| mockups, and sometimes try to show me why the computers are
| wrong. I don't speak their languages, so it's usually lost on
| me, though I've learned that there's about 50 different ways
| to say certain words in Spanish between Arizona and Tierra
| del Fuego.
|
| Could they be protecting their jobs? If that's all they did
| for the company, then maybe. But translation is only about
| 25% of their work, so they'd still be employed. A few long
| for good internet-based translation so they can do other
| things.
| layer8 wrote:
| The hamburger menu would be fine, even great, if it was a
| standard menu that every mobile app had in the same place with
| the same look [0]. But its purpose, positioning, and look is
| different in every app, so it's just one more thing to click on
| to see what it does. It also doesn't make sense as soon as you
| have more than one menu [1], or on the desktop -- mostly because
| a single menu rarely makes sense on the desktop, and because an
| icon tends to be a much smaller pointer target compared to a
| regular labeled menu, for such a main entry point.
|
| [0] like in Windows 1.0, I guess:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4e/Windows1.0.pn...
|
| [1] unless it's a secondary but universal menu like the Windows
| system menu in [0]
| xg15 wrote:
| On that matter, I don't get Android's design trajectory: They
| _used to_ have exactly that: A standard button in the OS for
| the app context menu, on some devices even a physical button.
| For some reason, they got rid of it in newer versions, so every
| interested app has to implement it itself, which of course
| causes to UI to become wildly inconsistent between apps. I don
| 't understand why.
| izacus wrote:
| That was 15 years ago.
| fidotron wrote:
| They had enough fun getting app developers to support the
| back button properly, let alone the context menu!
|
| In truth Android has suffered from the fact everyone starts
| on iOS first and then ports to Android, screen by screen in
| many cases, meaning accommodation of Android specific UI
| flows simply doesn't happen.
|
| The removal of physical buttons was largely motivated by OEMs
| wanting to eliminate moving parts which make things far more
| expensive to build/test than simply one slightly bigger
| capacitive touchscreen.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| physical buttons are also a pain for waterproofing
| tdeck wrote:
| I'm pretty sure on most phones those buttons were just an
| extension of the digitizer / touchscreen backlight.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| I recently had to resume using Windows extensively after a long
| hiatus, and the regressions I had already noticed in occasional
| use remain an infuriating PITA every damned day. It's not a
| matter of adjustment to something different. It's a matter of
| incompetent UI.
|
| The elimination of the standard menu bar in one application
| after another is a huge one. Look at Edge: I wanted to save a
| PDF I was viewing. Fat chance.
|
| There's no menu. In the toolbar past the URL box there's a
| jagged Pac-Man that I guess is supposed to be yet another
| "gear" icon. Then there's a star with lines in it for
| "favorites" and then your own avatar and then three dots with a
| tiny upward pink arrow overlapping part of one of them.
|
| In the upper-left corner of the window there are more boxy
| icons... let's see what those are... "Workspaces" and "Tab
| actions menu."
|
| So is "save file" under Gear-Man, the three dots, or somewhere
| else?
|
| And BTW, WHAT APPLICATION IS THIS? You have no idea which
| window belongs to which one, because the title bars are
| missing.
|
| What a truly incredible, pathetic mess. The Mac's single menu
| bar is a UI blunder, but NO menu bar is monumentally stupid.
| pigeons wrote:
| Somewhere along the way I have lost title bars to know the
| title of each tab in my browser, whether firefox or brave. I
| don't know if I need to set it in the browser, or kde, or
| kwin, i also tried microsoft windows and the same behavior.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| In Firefox if you right-click the title bar and "Customize
| Toolbar..." you can check Title Bar.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Thank you for putting in words what has been subconsciously
| annoying me about modernized windows applications. It seems
| like they are consistently worse with no recognizable
| improvements.
|
| Who is to blame? Is it the UI people wanting a "clean" look
| or is it misguided UX people?
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| I think it's people who lack
|
| 1. Experience
|
| 2. Aptitude
|
| 3. Supervision
|
| And then there are the apologists who attack anyone who
| calls for better, and almost the entire rest of the
| population... who
|
| 1. Don't take time to convey feedback
|
| 2. Can't find a way to convey feedback
|
| 3. Can't distill exactly why the product sucks and
| formulate feedback.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When will Windows replace the start menu with a hamburger? When
| will Apple replace the Apple menu with a hamburger?
| Clamchop wrote:
| Using the product or vendor logo as a menu icon on desktop is
| its own trope. The Apple menu and the Start menu aren't even
| the same kind of menu, nor do they function the same as
| "hamburger" app or website navigation on mobile.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| lol "why are menus represented by hamburgers, kebabs, meatballs"
| ... "beats me. They're food and you usually have food on a menu?"
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| My assumption is some designer chose the three horizontal lines
| to suggest a list of choices. Later, for some tiny space where
| lines didn't fit well, they were crushed into three dots
| stacked vertically (which also sort of suggests an ellipsis
| tipped on its side?) Why we decided to use food metaphors...
| well, who isn't thinking about what's for lunch?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > which also sort of suggests an ellipsis tipped on its side
|
| They're bullet points indicating a list of items.
| vladstudio wrote:
| On my personal website I decided to have a button that has both
| hamburger icon and the word "menu" (on mobile version). Had no
| complaints!
|
| https://vlad.studio/
| kogus wrote:
| Not related to the original post, but I have been visiting your
| site for 15+ years now, and it's one of my favorite online art
| sites. Really grateful for your many years of beautiful work.
| yreg wrote:
| Wow, I forgot about this place, but 15 years ago it was my
| favorite source of wallpapers. The art is as beautiful as
| ever.
|
| So are some of the accompanying texts:
|
| > This picture is dedicated to Kiev (Kyiv), a capital of
| Ukraine. It is loosely based on a 13-th century map - this is
| what center of Kyiv looked like ~900 years ago! The original
| map also included the city wall - however, I decided not to
| wrap the buildings into the wall, since in my dream world, a
| city would not need walls.
|
| https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/kyiv/
| esafak wrote:
| There is a balance to be struck between accessibility (speed
| sense) and discoverability, which disfavor hamburgers, and
| cognitive load minimization, which favors hamburgers, if you
| reserve it for lesser-used items. Perhaps a themed menu icon that
| indicates what it holds would be better.
| myself248 wrote:
| Waitasec, you mean we could give icons different shapes to
| indicate what they do?
| ulrischa wrote:
| As here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182509
| timewizard wrote:
| Was it ever? I honestly think you could have used almost any
| icon, given the limited screen real estate, and the tendency to
| put menu buttons at the corners of the interface.
|
| I think we spend too much time pondering "semiotics" when we
| should just consider the _basic_ "ergonomics."
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| When I explained what this icon was called to my ~70yo mother,
| she said it should be called the pancake menu instead. I agree
| and have been saying that ever since.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Playing with some of my older iDevices recently, I realized
| that, to me, the page curl icon is the best indicator of "more
| stuff in here."
|
| To refresh your memory: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BJBDGA/apple-
| iphone-3gs-3g-smartph...
| officeplant wrote:
| It still hasn't entered the lexicon of normal folk and has me
| going NO THE THREE LINES / THREE DOTS in X CORNER quite often.
| Too bad it's not four.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The patent for the "start here" menu expired a decade ago. We can
| just call it the "start here" button.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/DE69523543D1/
| jimjimjim wrote:
| For people mentioning the need for translations, clicking the
| button, regardless of label or not will usually show... text.
| that needs translations. only one more word for a label.
| EGreg wrote:
| This one was better: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-
| menus/
|
| Our findings show that, across all 3 different metrics, hidden
| navigation significantly decreases user experience both on mobile
| and on desktop.
|
| Both on mobile and desktop, the content discoverability was
| significantly lower when the navigation was hidden. This measure
| showed a more than 20% drop in discoverability on sites with
| hidden navigation, compared with sites with visible or combo
| navigation. In other words, visible or combo navigation made
| people more likely to complete the task successfully and without
| relying on search.
| juped wrote:
| There's a special place in Hell for those who put hamburger menus
| in desktop apps, _Jetbrains_.
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