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.
[1] unless it’s a secondary but universal menu like the Windows system menu in [0]
xg15 · 3h ago
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.
fidotron · 2h ago
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.
tdeck · 1h ago
I'm pretty sure on most phones those buttons were just an extension of the digitizer / touchscreen backlight.
skrtskrt · 2h ago
physical buttons are also a pain for waterproofing
izacus · 3h ago
That was 15 years ago.
DidYaWipe · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 1h ago
In Firefox if you right-click the title bar and "Customize Toolbar..." you can check Title Bar.
jimjimjim · 2h ago
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 · 28m ago
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.
I just wasted a good portion of my afternoon trying to activate change-tracking in Word. The Word UI is an even bigger POS than the rest of Windows. I mean... it's a wonderland of baffling rabbit-holes, to the point where I'm laughing while typing this out because it seems like a prank. MS even eschewed their own File dialog in this thing, to replace it with a page that looks like hand-coded HTML without a stylesheet. Truly incredible.
So I took screen shots. I wrote up a detailed explanation as to why this is defective. And then I used MS's "Feedback Hub" (which vanishingly few people are going to find or bother with) to try to file a report. After typing it all out and attaching files...
"Something went wrong. Please try again later."
And of course it deleted all my work. And it has happened on four attempts throughout the day.
So when companies claim, gee, no one has complained before... it's just another mockery of the recipient.
ElevenLathe · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
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."
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.
nancyminusone · 4h ago
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
SoftTalker · 4h ago
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.
skrtskrt · 2h ago
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
ericmcer · 3h ago
The brain is better with images once it has been trained to recognize them. Just sucks for the people that never got the training.
card_zero · 3h ago
Not an option, because it makes it harder work to sell a product to the Chinese.
kevindamm · 3h ago
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 · 1h ago
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?
foresto · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
Easy i18n? They don't have to translate the UI to 30+ languages.
foresto · 14m ago
Yes, that's the obvious reason for it, but having a reason doesn't make the icons any more comprehensible. Good luck using those appliances if you're a visitor who doesn't have the manuals and hasn't learned each manufacturer's unique iconography.
scyzoryk_xyz · 4h ago
Can you please let them know to change it? Someone should tell them
josefrichter · 6h ago
People get used to everything. Including war. Just because they learn how to pull through, does not mean it's any good.
savanaly · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
False
vladstudio · 3h ago
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!
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 · 2h ago
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.
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 · 3h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
>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 · 2h ago
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.
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.
SirFatty · 8h ago
I assumed that hamburger description was after-the-fact, not the original designation. It always felt that way to me.
loloquwowndueo · 4h ago
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.
JohnFen · 8h ago
I think the graphic itself was intended to represent a menu: a list of items.
Izkata · 8h ago
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 · 3h ago
> three dots
The kebab
officeplant · 2h ago
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.
v5v3 · 8h ago
The article says 'positon the Hamburger in the top left corner', but many sites have it in top right too.
Because having a full menu bar at the top made it too easy to find options.
streptomycin · 4h ago
A full menu bar would take up too much space, then they wouldn't have room to put huge amounts of padding everywhere.
deepvibrations · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 3h ago
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.
IAmBroom · 8h ago
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...
inanutshellus · 8h ago
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 · 7h ago
> Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires top-right.
Surely bottom-right?
OkayPhysicist · 1h ago
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.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
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.
pier25 · 4h ago
Most people use their right hand to interact with a mobile phone so it makes more sense to put it on the right side.
vjvjvjvjghv · 8h ago
A good compromise would be to place it in the middle. That way everybody is equally unhappy
martin_a · 8h ago
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.
bandoti · 8h ago
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!
throwaway843 · 8h ago
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. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.
bandoti · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
> 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 · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
Well, actually the three bars are now two: the cool kids have replaced hamburger with a sausage roll.
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.
inanutshellus · 8h ago
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.
etblg · 5h ago
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.
sceptic123 · 7h ago
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.
loloquwowndueo · 4h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
JohnFen · 8h ago
Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the disorganization.
inanutshellus · 8h ago
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.
No comments yet
tshaddox · 3h ago
And for restaurant websites, “Menu” is often one of the links inside the menu, so that’s certainly confusing.
JohnFen · 8h ago
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.
v5v3 · 8h ago
"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 · 7h ago
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, ..."
msgodel · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
Don't make me think? Don't let me think!
xnx · 8h ago
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.
bilekas · 8h ago
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..
JohnFen · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
IAmBroom · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
> 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.
bandoti · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
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 · 4h ago
> 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.
1970-01-01 · 2h ago
The patent for the "start here" menu expired a decade ago. We can just call it the "start here" button.
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 · 1h ago
Waitasec, you mean we could give icons different shapes to indicate what they do?
juped · 33m ago
There's a special place in Hell for those who put hamburger menus in desktop apps, Jetbrains.
When will Windows replace the start menu with a hamburger? When will Apple replace the Apple menu with a hamburger?
Clamchop · 2h ago
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.
samwhiteUK · 8h ago
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.
josefrichter · 8h ago
I always said Hamburger is an excuse for a lazy designer :-) Take it with a pinch of salt.
ryanmcbride · 8h ago
I always use em because I'm the laziest type of designer: a dev
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.
jimjimjim · 2h ago
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.
loloquwowndueo · 4h ago
lol “why are menus represented by hamburgers, kebabs, meatballs” … “beats me. They’re food and you usually have food on a menu?”
blacksmith_tb · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
> which also sort of suggests an ellipsis tipped on its side
They're bullet points indicating a list of items.
loloquwowndueo · 8m ago
Meat. Balls.
pharrington · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
The article points out the solution: the word "MENU".
Milner08 · 8h ago
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 · 8h ago
Menu seems to be the kind of word that pops up in a lot of languages.
qualeed · 4h ago
Some with extra letters, or accents, or fonts entirely. Other languages share the concept but the word is completely different.
μενού, valikko, roghchlár, メニュー , مِنو, меню́, trình đơn
To pick a few.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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.
pharrington · 8h ago
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.
timewizard · 3h ago
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."
xnx · 8h ago
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.
[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]
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.
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.
Who is to blame? Is it the UI people wanting a "clean" look or is it misguided UX people?
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.
I just wasted a good portion of my afternoon trying to activate change-tracking in Word. The Word UI is an even bigger POS than the rest of Windows. I mean... it's a wonderland of baffling rabbit-holes, to the point where I'm laughing while typing this out because it seems like a prank. MS even eschewed their own File dialog in this thing, to replace it with a page that looks like hand-coded HTML without a stylesheet. Truly incredible.
So I took screen shots. I wrote up a detailed explanation as to why this is defective. And then I used MS's "Feedback Hub" (which vanishingly few people are going to find or bother with) to try to file a report. After typing it all out and attaching files...
"Something went wrong. Please try again later."
And of course it deleted all my work. And it has happened on four attempts throughout the day.
So when companies claim, gee, no one has complained before... it's just another mockery of the recipient.
To refresh your memory: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BJBDGA/apple-iphone-3gs-3g-smartph...
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.
"What is that? Why don't they put 'menu' there?"
I don't know dad, I'm not the one who made it
Standardized icons can be laid out easily regardless of language
[◂] [xxx] [▸]
Left button was UP and right button was DOWN (numbers e.g. temperature).
Is there any reason that ◂ would be UP in Chinese?
https://vlad.studio/
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The kebab
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.
I'd be interested in people's thoughts about which side is best, or if it just doesn't matter.
"Not quite top, mostly right" is where IBM puts their SECOND hamburger icon on DNG software. May they rot in eternity...
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.
Surely bottom-right?
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!
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. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
See https://apple.com
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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.
Mobile users?
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.
Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating systems and computer programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
https://patents.google.com/patent/DE69523543D1/
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.
They're bullet points indicating a list of items.
Which means we can also adjust to a waaaay better alternative to the hamburger menu (but i dont know what that is rn).
I dont think that is any better at all. If anything I think its solidly worse.
μενού, valikko, roghchlár, メニュー , مِنو, меню́, trình đơn
To pick a few.
I think we spend too much time pondering "semiotics" when we should just consider the _basic_ "ergonomics."
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.
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